Weight in Animation - Ball Bounces

From learning the basics of animation movement such as easing, arcs and anticipation principles I began to start working with animating different ball weights which, compared to the other animation tasks, took up a lot more hours and actually got me in the mindset of how to do things industry standard.

Before I started doing any animation at all, I needed to observe different ball movements and choose three different ball weights I wanted to reference from. As much as I wanted to get my own references for this assignment I unfortunately don't have any balls to record, so I did the next best thing and referenced them from YouTube. This video from Michele Schottenbauer was incredibly useful for my research as she uses a great diversity of different balls bouncing on the floor whilst setting up a simple background setup to make the balls easily observable. To narrow it down to three balls though I decided to choose the basketball, the ping pong ball and the baseball to use as references:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZlYl0l2lFs

The next stage was to translate what I've observed into frames, and to do that I headed into SyncSketch and imported each ball bounce as a separate 'review'. In each of these reviews I had to note down each frame the ball touched the floor, as well as the frame where the ball reaches its apex height on each bounce, although the process was quite tedious I knew this was the only way I could get the most accurate results on my Maya animation.

Once I finished noting down the frames on SyncSketch I had to write them down on a bar sheet to make them more easily translatable for the animation stage. This process was also tedious considering I had to look back through every frame I noted down on each 3 of the balls and to create separate bar sheets for them as well. I do however thing that the time I consumed creating these bar sheets definitely saved me in the long run since I was referencing them a lot once creating the animation and without them I think I would've spent twice as long getting a result that wouldn't of looked authentic.

Now that the translation stage was finished, I began trying to mimic these motions in Maya and because I already planned ahead and wrote down the keyframes on each action I didn't need to improvise , all I needed to do was put in the co-ordinates of where the ball should be on each key frame and playblast it, however it wasn't just as simple as that and I did run into quite a big issue I needed to fix before I the animation was ready.

The issue was the easing of the ball movement which isn't a problem at all when the ball is in midair, however it eases down and up whilst its falling which gave it this very unrealistic movement as if the ball wasn't bouncing at all, but just floating back up as if gravity lifted it. This is where I started to dive my hands into the graph editor and take a look at the problem:

As you can see the curve as it lands has this sort of 'u' shape to it which is the reason to why it eases more smoothly as it lifts back off the ground. To change this what I would need to do is to select all the point at the bottom and click the diagonal line in the hotbar menu, thus creating a sine wave which looks something we're more familiar to with ball bounces.

One I was satisfied with the results on one animation, the other two came after very quickly since I knew what technicalities needed to be applied to all of them. After they were finished I began to playblast each of the animations and create my own video showcasing the ball weights which I'm quite satisfied with. The only feedback I will give is that the animation personally still doesn't look accurate and I think it has something to do with the height of the ball on each apex: I've noted down the keyframe it's needed to be on however I haven't noted down how high the ball is from the ground; this was something I made up logically. As a self-reflection note I think keeping that in mind would definitely make my animation look accurate for the future.

https://vimeo.com/476665655