Week 10 Lab 2 - Bouncing Ball Animations

Exercise 1

This is how I created my animations.

Process

a) Bouncing Ball Animation

First, I created an animation chart for my bouncing ball animation to path how the ball moves. Then, I drew out several ball objects at the highest and lowest points of the bouncing animation. This shall be my guideline for the rest of my bouncing ball animation.

If I play my animation now, it would look very staggered and the ball will just move around from one place to another without any motion. Therefore, I have to include buffer frames for my animation so that it would look smoother.

This is how the timeline of my bouncing ball animation looks like after the buffer frames have been added. Whilst adding the buffer frames, I modified the timeline by shifting keyframes so that it would make sure the timing of the ball coincides with the speed at which the ball is bouncing at.

This is the result of my simple bouncing ball animation with pencil:

b) Bowling Ball Animation

This is the animation chart of my bowling ball. Since a bowling ball is heavy, there would not be much squash and stretch and much less bounce on the ball.

This is the result of my bowling ball animation:

c) Rough animation

This is the animation chart of my rough animation. There are three layers, the body layer, the hand layer for hand movements and the animation chart.

This is the result of my animation:

Exercise 2

1. What is ease-in ease-out in reference to animation?

Ease in means that the animation starts out slow and ends up fast. Ease out means that the animation starts out fast and ends up slow.

2. What does frames-per-second mean?

It represents the amount of frames that run through in one second. One frame = one picture. The higher the fps of an animation is, the smoother the animation.

3.The spacing of the ticks in the animation chart below is for an object bouncing with linear speed over 12 frames - draw a similar chart, but with ease-in and ease-out

Techniques

This exercise made me familiar with different animation techniques, such as onion skin, keyframes, ease-in ease-out and animation charts.

Reflection

Maybe because I have some sort of animation background, I felt that this exercise was quite easy to do.

I didn't really like the interface of Pencil though. Maybe because I was more used to big programs such as adobe flash and adobe imageready.

Overall, I felt that this exercise has given me a refreshing new look on animation.

References

Pencil guides