Principles of animating a Bouncing Ball - 1

Carrying on with arcs I will present to you my research on how to animate a ball, one of the first places to start animating and is made up of arcs! It does also use some of the other principles such as timing, slow-out, slow-in, squash and stretch.

Path of Action

Firstly you need a path of action. This is where the ball will bounce and is just arcs. We will just focus on doing one bounce for now as once you know how to do one you can do more.

If you wanted to do more bounces, the arcs would need to stay in line like the red line shows with the arcs in the bottom drawing on the left.

Nice arc reference

I came across this image last night of an Elephant Seal. It has flung dirt over itself and the photographer has caught the arc of dirt it left in doing so. If you look carefully enough in films, animation and real life you will see examples of the 12 principles everywhere. I've decided that I will start saving any references I find of these that I think are good and will help me in the future. If you are looking to be an animator too then I'd suggest doing the same, reference is always handy and try drawing or animating from them too; practice makes perfect :D

Loan didn't arrive in time :(

Sadly my Career Development Loan didn't arrive in time for the Fall term so I have been transferred to the Winter term. I was gutted at first but then I decided to look at the silver lining. By doing the Winter term I can still go to Coffee Talks with Victoria and her guests, its something I look forward to as its always a laugh and I find out some pretty cool stuff during them. Also, I will graduate when its the Animation Mentor BBQ so I can fly over for graduation and the BBQ, which is supposedly a brilliant event that loads of people go to.

While I am waiting to start, I am going to practice animating by doing tutorials and reading books. I will also add to my sketchbooks by going out and drawing people or by drawing people on the TV while I am watching any way. I will post these in the sketchbook section so make sure to keep checking that to see them.