Bouncing Ball

The second task set for us was to create a basic bouncing ball animation, this will help me understand the basic animation principals, allowing me to develop a sense of timing, weight and balance. Although I have had previous experience with animating with key frames in 3Ds Max, Maya provided new tools such as the graph editor which I was new to.

Here I created a basic sphere, snapping it to the center of the grid. Before I add any key-frames I need to extend the playback range, I do this by typing in the values on the animation time slide to 72, this gives me more frames to work with.

Now I need to animate the ball bouncing, to do this i must add 'key-frames' at the points where the ball changes direction. First of all I freeze transforms and then ensure that I have the first frame selected, hold Shift+W, if done correctly it should create a red felt on the time-slide which represents a key-frame.

Using the same process as before I have created a key-frame in frame 20 at the point i want the ball to stop and begin to fall. This is the same process with move, rotate and scale tools.

Again I created another key-frame of where I want the ball to bounce. I'll repeat this process over again to create another two more bounces, but reducing the amount it raises on each bounce.