Bouncing Balls!

So we finally got around to delving further into Maya and it turned out to be quite difficult indeed. We were given the task to create 3 animated balls; a football, a bowling ball and a pingpong ball.

The first ball I created -after quite a few hours fiddling in maya- pleased me at first, but after having a few other peoples opinions and coming back to it after a little while away from the computer, it seemed overly bouncy and unrealistic. You can see this version below.



I then proceeded to create the exact opposite, an underly bouncy football.



It was difficult finding a mid-ground, especially since I was completely new to the graph editor and the entire animating side of Maya. On top of the technical difficulties there was the question of how much stretch and squash to put in -how much realism I wanted- something I hadn't realised before. Usually you just draw the ball a few times and that's it; the way you can tweak things right until the end in maya was a new experience. The day after I created these two animations, we had a talk with Peter Bailey. Aside from being a really nice guy, his visit was handy because watching him animating in maya taught me a few things, specifically how you control handles in the graph editor. This was a great help in refining the bounce of my balls. I spent the rest of the day playing around and created a ball I was quite pleased with (which i won't upload because I think two progress shots is enough for anyone).

I spent the entire next day in the studio, first off I tweaked my football into something i'm very happy with, then in a significantly smaller amount of time managed to create my Pingpong and Bowling ball animations. I found it much easier when i'd found my bearings in the graph editor. All 3 animations are below, hopefully you'll be able to tell which is which without me explaining, or i'm a complete failure.







Overall i've enjoyed this assignment. It was definitely intimidating and a little disheartening at first, but as time went on and I learnt the tools a little better, things became much easier and I've made some animations which I'm really pleased with. The only scary thing is how complicated animating a simple bloody ball was lolz, it won't deter me though, I look forward to the next maya task :D