Bouncing Ball Animation

Bouncing Ball Animation

For this animation, I implemented Maya 2011. I made some progress using minimal mouse clicks, however it was very slight to almost no change in the way I would regularly model. I started experimenting with some of the keyboard functions for Maya and found the following useful: R = rotate, E = scale, W = move, and S = set key frame. Several other ways to move an object in Maya are to press Alt and the directional buttons: up, down, left, right and to enter a specific value into the Channel Box Editor to make the movement of the object exact. First, I created a sphere and used the different tools like rotate, move, and scale. I set key points on the animation timeline in Maya to correspond to the movement I created with the bouncy ball. I rendered each of the frames of the animation separately and saved them.

 Adobe Premiere CS5 is the program I used to put the animation into video form.  I combined the frames into about a 10 second animation. Each frame appears in the video for this duration: 00; 00; 00; 05. Once the video was in place, I exported it to a Microsoft AVI and uploaded it to the blog.

Detailed Recipe:

1.       Create sphere (radius = 1, axis and height divisions =20)and plane with approximately 27 X 10 X 1 units for animation in Maya.

2.       Position ball in place to convey being dropped on a surface from a certain height.

3.       Move the bouncy ball for the first two bounces with the mouse.

-          Use the move tool to move negatively along the x axis and up and down on the y axis.

-          Scale when the first bounce occurs to make the ball seem like it is impacted by the force.

4.       Repeat the directional movement of the ball for the rest of the bounces with mouse /alt + directional keys.

5.       Use the move and scale tools to flip the ball 180 degrees at the end of the animation.

6.       Set the key frames on the animation timeline throughout the process.

(1,4,6,13,16,18,20,22,24,26,28,29,30,32,34,38,40,42,44,47,48,50,53,55,57,60,61,63,67,70).

7.       Render each key frame out as a single frame and save them as numbers (1,2,3,4…etc.) in your IFDM 210 folder.

8.       Import frames into Premiere.

9.       Highlight the frames from the bin window and drag into the timeline.

10.   Select all the frames and adjust the duration many times until the duration (00; 00; 00; 05) occurs.(It took me watching the video and experimenting to get it right)

11.   Delete the space in between the frames every time the duration is changed.

12.   Play the animation to see that it works.

13.   Delete 32-36 key frames.(No movement).

14. Go to the edit menu, click select all.

15.   Export it to Microsoft AVI file sent to your IFDM 210 folder(review options/rename file).

16.   Upload to the blog.