Activity 5: Drawing a Bouncing Basket Ball and Bowling Ball

T-PRIN-004-016

The bouncing ball is the classic animation exercise, demonstrating not only squash and stretch, but also the effect of gravity and inertia on the spacing and timing of the animation.

In this exercise, you will experiment with basic squash and stretch and observe how the properties of objects affect how they move.

The ball moves fastest just before and after it hits the ground, and decelerates as it reaches the top of its arc.

The ball stretches as it gains speed, and then squashes on impact with the ground.

If the ball has the solid and rigid consistency of a bowling ball, the squash and stretch will be smaller. In reality, a bowling ball does not squash, but in animation, you need to add a little bit of squash and stretch in order to give a better illusion of movement and weight.

You should complete the exercise in a new project. When you're done, take a look at the material in the Lesson 6 sample material.

Take a moment to visualize the scene in your head:

  • Visualize a basketball bouncing across the screen.
  • Visualize how it bounces when it hits the ground.
  • Visualize how many times it bounces and by how much the height of these bounces gradually decrease.
  • Did you see the squash and stretch?
  • Did you feel the ease-in and ease-out?

The ball moves fastest just before and after it hits the ground, and decelerates as it reaches the top of its arc.

The ball stretches as it gains speed, and then squashes on impact with the ground.

If the ball has the solid and rigid consistency of a bowling ball, the squash and stretch will be smaller. In reality, the bowling ball does not squash, but in its animation, you need to add a little bit of squash and stretch to create a better sense of movement and the illusion of weight.

Required Material

You can download the provided sample material for this module and use the following templates to use as a reference to compare with your final sketch. Don't forget to unzip (uncompress) the files before placing them in your library.

  • MO-PRIN-004/09-basketball-path.tpl
  • MO-PRIN-004/10-basketball-animation.tpl
  • MO-PRIN-004/11-bowlingball-path.tpl
  • MO-PRIN-004/12-bowlingball-animation.tpl

Quiz


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