Feedback from my Ball With A Tail

Today I showed my animation to the class and the response was surprisingly good :)
The one comment about improvement was related to the few seconds the ball is waving it's tale in excitement. To make this even better I have been encouraged to make the ball look even more excited by adding some more animation to the ball itself and that's what I'll try and tweak for my final hand-in.

Stay tuned for more posts ;)

Ball With A Tail, First Hand-in candidate

So I've done some refining to the animation. The blocking was taken quite far so it really wasn't much more to it than to add some breakdowns to the tail and body.

By this I mean adding the famous "S shapes" to the tale in proper breakdown positions and making sure the ball squashes and stretches properly and on time with the impact.
As I had gotten to this stage I also had received feedback from my fellow student, Daniel Natland. He did have some comments on how much the ball squashes that makes it look like a fat character which does make it cute so it wasn't a negative comment initially.

But thinking about it and what the ball does in this animation I decided to tone the squashes down a bit so it seems a bit lighter.

With all these changes made and refining done to the animation I present to you my first Hand-In Candidate, Fully Rendered:



Please Watch in HD

Ball With A Tail Block Animation

So here is my animation at it's blocking stage from both the perspective view and the camera that will be used in the final hand in:






As I got started with the blocking I soon realized that I had to cut off the last part of the animation where the ball catches fire since I've already exceeded the 10 seconds.

I also showed this to Penny Holton and the feedback I got was to drop the flames and end the clip where the blocking ends. At least for the ICA and if I want to I can add these effects and extend the clip later for my own showreel which I think I might just do :)
But for now it will have to be without flames and as the clip ends before the ball realizes it has caught fire, there isn't any need to add the flames around the ring at this stage.

But with this feedback in hand I continued and took the animation to the next stage of refining it.

Ball With A Tail

I've been looking forward to this exercise as it is so much more interesting to animate something with personality and to be honest I have already made a rig for it 1-2 weeks ago when I got to know about the exercise.

I have also made a render of the rig so you can have a look at what it should look like when rendered:



" IT'S SO FLUFFY!! " =P









So the exercise specifies that the ball has to jump on a "box" and back down.
As the ball should have personality, I think the ball should have a reason to go on top of that box but coming up with a good idea seemed kind of difficult for the small time frame and the short animation so to make it simple so I could get started animating I decided to make the ball jump through a ring of fire. At least that's my initial idea. The clip should end with the ball being proud to have done the stunt and then shortly realize it has caught fire, freaks out and jumps into the camera and faints (and possibly burns up).

To get started with this idea I made a small thumbnail storyboard which you can see below:



With that settled I got started animating, blocking the animation out.

Improvements to the Pendulum

So I've gotten my feedback and most of it was that the pendulum seems to be going a bit slow (underwater animation) so the main thing I've done is to speed the whole animation up a bit.

Also giving the pendulum more of a "throwing swing" as the pendulum stops.
The pendulum also now starts swinging as the base is breaking into rest position.
I will be working more with the animation later on to give it more flow, but this is what I've got for the moment:

What's been happening lately?

Hi.

Well it's been a while now since I've made any updates with what's going on. Sorry about that so now I will fill you in on what's been going on.

First of all I guess I shouldn't post my animations as final ones before the ICA is handed in as I did get feedback on both my bouncing balls and pendulum animation about improvements that can be done before the final deadline. Of course then again, the one animating a sequence will never really find a point to decide that "Now it's finished". There will always be a room for improvement but one has got to draw the line somewhere, right?

Next to this I have also worked on my ball with tail and done improvements to the pendulum animation which I will discuss in separate posts following this one.

This is just to make it more organized and easier for YOU to read :)

Pendulum, Final Version

The feedback I received from Penny Holton and other students was that the pendulum should settle quicker than it does as well as smoothing out the animation.

What I've done is making the extreme poses less extreme which results in the pendulum settling sooner and deleting the animation that's unnecessary. To smooth out the motion as much as possible I worked with the spacing, making the breakdowns much more subtle than previous which did give me a smoother result.

So here is what I have ended up with:

Bouncing Balls Final Version

After receiving some feedback from Penny Holton, I realized that bigger changes to the animation was necessary. The ball simply bounces too much for a tennis ball. But changing the way it bounces in some point of the animation, will drastically change how the ball will continue to bounce the rest of the animation so I had to delete any animation that was made after the point I needed to edit.

Through the process leading to the final version I deleted my animation 1-3 times before I came up with a result that seemed correct

Here is an example of what I mean:




The ball simply bounces too far out from the wall and hits the bowling ball one last time and I decided I'm not buying that so I scraped the animation and edited this.








Now the ball hits the ground earlier and settles down much quicker which I think seems much more realistic.










After doing these adjustments I feel like I can wrap this one up. Of course there is still room for more improvement. It always is with animation but now I feel like I can put this animation aside and move on.

Pendulum Animaiton Version 2

I have now managed to smooth out more of the animation but still there is something about the upper segment of the chain that moves kind of choppy when swinging back the second time that I am still trying to figure out what to do with in order to smooth it out. The rest of the animation is starting to come together I think.

I put on some more animation to the base, making it move in an arc and give it some more rotation as it stops, giving it the sense of more weight attached to it as this is the goal with the animation for me.
I want the ball of the bottom of the chain to be heavy and therefore not making a springy pendulum.

Pendulum Animation

Since the bouncing balls are close to completion I have decided to take a break from it and move on to the pendulum. So far I have animated the whole sequence but there is still need for a lot of tweaking on the timing and spacing in order to make the animation flow better.
I think the beginning looks good but as the base comes to a stop, the chain seems to pause for half a second and then shoot forward so I'm still working on smoothing this out.

Anyway, this is what I have so far:





Of course when doing this animation I have taken great use of Keith Lango's Tutorial on YouTube

His tutorial about overlapping action is a MUST SEE for everyone who wants to learn this principle:

Bouncing Balls Version 3

I have now finished the entire sequence. By this I mean that I have animated the entire scene to the point where both balls come to rest.
Of course there is still room for improvement but I feel close to wrapping this one up by now.

There are a couple of places where I know the tennis ball does have a bit too long hang time in the air. I'm still working on trying to fix this but it seems to be difficult as I am trying to change the spacing instead of the timing. If I am to change the timing it will immediately have an effect on the rest of the scene where the two balls interact and that's why I'm trying to solve this by working with the spacing.

Well, no more talking. Time to show:

Bouncing Balls Version 2

I have now worked further on the animation and have done a few improvements to the bowling ball. It now bounces a bit higher after falling off the edge and I have started the animation of the tennis ball where you can see it interacting with the bowling ball.



Of course I still have to continue the animation until the tennis ball comes to rest as well as improving the whole animation even further.

Bowling Ball Reference

Since I don't have a bowling ball myself that I can observe, I have been looking around the web for reference videos and I found a very good reference video at YouTube.

It proves that a bowling ball sure can bounce if it achieves the right height and momentum.
Of course there are several factors that decide how well the ball will bounce. The height, speed, the ball's weight and the surface it hits.
In the reference one can clearly see the balls bouncing as they are being thrown from a pretty high altitude in comparison to the altitude the ball falls from in my animation.

Based on my observations from the reference video, I do believe I should increase the bounce in the bowling ball a bit more but not a lot as it is a HEAVY bowling ball falling from a lower height than the ones in the video.

Next to this I will continue to smooth out the animation as good as I can.

The video reference I have found can be seen here:

Tennis Ball Reference video

It would of course be lovely to have my own bowling ball to study as well but I have decided to work on that without a reference and make it look right instead.
For the tennis ball I have made a small purchase of getting one myself so I can toss that one around and study how it bounces.

The one thing I'm especially trying to figure out by filming my reference and putting a frame counter on the video is to get the timing right.

You can see my recorded reference video here:

The bouncing balls

The assignment requires me to animate 2 balls with different physical properties, were I have chosen to use a heavy bowling ball and a light tennis ball.

The task also requires me to animate the balls hitting an obstacle such as a box. However, my idea is to make the balls interact, where the tennis ball hits the bowling ball.

If this isn't approved with my tutor, I will get the balls to interact with another object so the task will be answered.

So this is my first draft where I have animated the bowling ball:




It of course will need more tweaking to get the animation flowing better and maybe increase the speed of the ball as it gets closer to the edge. Now it is slowing down and then kind of taking off over the edge and I believe it will look better if it keeps a more constant speed through this part.

Our first assingments

Our first assignments have been given and it takes us all back to basics.
The famous Bouncing ball and pendulum animation.

Since we are going back to basics I have decided to go through Richard Williams "The Animator's Survival Kit" once more to repeat all the basics and this is what I have spent a great deal of my time on now in the beginning as it will prepare me for both the animation task as well as the presentation task (Follow Through and Overlapping action) I will be presenting in the coming week.

I have also spent time on looking after reference footage of bouncing balls but I will also try to make some myself and post these later on.

Ice Breaker

Hi and welcome to my animation blog.

This is the blog where one will be able to read everything about my progress through my year as a Master's student at Teesside University, meaning all my work through all my modules leading up to the final project which will also be posted here.

I will be posting my animation WIP as well as some of the sketches I will be producing throughout the course.

Next to the posted work I will comment and reflect over it.

With that said, I hope one will find this blog interesting as it fills up with updates through the year.