The Bouncy Ball

The bouncy ball project was all about squash and stretch mixed in with some movement fundamentals this is one of the key animations everyone does to start with as it covers a lot of things that will be used later for more interesting animations like character jumping for example.

I started with blocking out the movement like where the ball was bouncing how high etc this allowed me to get the factors for the height which meant I could keep the bounce height consistent and get smaller after each bounce whiles also making sure it hit the floor every time and the floor was the same height.

once everything was blocked out I began altering the speed of the bounces in the graph editor to get the bounces looking more dynamic and make them look like there was weight and character to the ball I mainly did this by breaking the keyframes on the ground and making a V shape on them like so.

the result of that was this video below:

It was starting to take shape so I went ahead and added a side-to-side movement squash and stretch and rotation to finish off the animation and bring life to the ball.