Noroff fagskole: A1 - Intro to animation 01

This week at Noroff, I am making a short animation of two different balls bouncing and leaving the scene.

Time-budget

Reference

For this assignment, we needed a reference video showing two different balls falling off a table.

I chose to use a reference video of a volleyball and a bowling-ball, considering the big difference between them.

Work

I started by importing the reference video in to after effects, where I used tracking to trace a line of the balls. Since it did this per frame, and the video was recorded in 24fps, I got a solid piece of information regarding the movement of the balls.

Sometimes, I had to manually control where the tracker left a track because of poor video quality and a bad background.

Once I had the two images I needed, I imported them into Maya as image planes. This allowed me to control how the balls would move.

After I had done that, I needed to make the balls rotate, squash and stretch.

I forgot to take screenshots of that process, but I do have some graphs showing the general movements the balls had gotten.

Here is a simple image showing a bit of the scene.

I made a shotcam, placed it where I wanted it to be, and started a playblast of the animation.

After all that, this is the final product.

Finished product

This was my first time ever animating something that needed special movement, and although it looks really simple, it's kind of difficult.

Trying to make something move like it does in real life, was a harder task than I imagined. Now, it wasn't T'HAT difficult, but it did take longer than I originally anticipated.

But I'm happy with the final product, although some movements look a bit weird, like the bowling balls speed at the end. Which, btw, is the last one.