Formative Feedback (Box Interaction & Ball Weights)

[FIRST YEAR] Animation 101

Covered today:

Before the feedback session I looked at this animation which is a good example of Box Interaction and Ball Weights as I'm going to show in today's lesson.

Presenting my Box Interaction & Ball Weights

I complete the Third eight exercises as I reached the third module milestone and the Final big review. I received OK formative feedback.  It was a compulsory progress review which took 4 hours to complete.


I uploaded each of my exercises to my Vimeo account. This time I looped 7 of my animation 3 times. But not the block interaction.

Exercises done for today:

1) Practice the fundamentals of a ball bounce

- A to B looping bounce animations in Maya.

Ultimate Basic Ball Bounce (looped):

There wasn't many words for this animation because this was a practice of the movement making a cartoon ball with a personality as no ball in reality bounce like that endlessly as gravity acts on the ball. So a ball would bounce endlessly (Looped). 

- A to B decaying bounce animations in Maya.

Ultimate Basic Ball Bounce (Decaying):

There wasn't many words for this animation because this was a practice of the movement. But from the previous animation Ultimate Basic Ball Bounce (Looped) this is what a ball would do in reality as the gravity is acting upon it. This animation doesn't look like it floating as it's linear to hit the floor but I don't know why one is different when hitting the floor to the other Decaying balls as I animated it the same as the others. It might be different to the other because I remember to make it Linear to this ball but not to the other probably because it was tied on that day.



- Decaying bounce across the screen in x-axis animations in Maya.

Ultimate Basic Ball Bounce (Decaying Across Screen in X-Axis):

There wasn't many words for this animation because this was a practice of the movement. This is the same movement as Ultimate Basic Ball Bounce (Decaying) but I added a value on the X-Axis to move the ball from A-to-B but it shows the 7th Principle of animation  'Arcs' (Read More Here) but what is different to this animation of the ball than just the Decaying Ball is that I put a roll at the end to distribute the final amount of energy to slow the ball down, I also added a pan (Camera Movement) to the animation to give it more room to move from A-to-B. Oh, I just finally realised why we did A-to-B's on Week 3 for this animation to make a smooth Eased (the 6th Principle of animation called 'Slow in & Slow Out' [Go here to read more]) movement. Even doing the Pendulums on Week 5 taught me how to make a rounded Arc. 

But by learning these Principles it make my previous skill level a lot greater as in college when I learning Animation they didn't teach me any of these basics. But Salford University is making my videos look a whole lot more professional.

Example of my Previous Showreel (June 2018):

2) Types of Ball bounce Exercises (Bowling ball, Beach ball, Basketball, Balloon)

Ultimate Bowling Ball Bounce (Decaying Across Screen in X-Axis):

Bowling ball reference video

Ultimate Beach Ball Bounce (Decaying Across Screen in X-Axis):

Johny suggested for it not to squash the ball before it hits the floor.

Beach ball reference video

Ultimate Basketball Bounce (Decaying Across Screen in X-Axis):

There was many words for these two animation above. Ffion said 'Looks a little bit like it's floating. It doesn't look like its bouncing on the floor'. So I suggested that it might need a shadow to fix it. But I was on the wrong wavelength. John said 'it would be a finishing touch' So the contact positions is curved making it look it's slowing down before it hits the floor.  This is also shown in the all the other ball bounce animations above, as all the balls look like there floating because I didn't know / remember at the time how to make the balls an Arced shape in the graph editor, I made them look like wavy / wiggly lines. But before the submission I will fix this problem as it will only take me a few minutes to fix this as its an easy fix.

Basket ball reference video

Play video from 0.45 seconds

Balloon No Bounce (Decaying):

For this animation I didn't know if a balloon with air actual bounce but not a large amount to the naked eye.

Balloon Bounce reference video

I know it's not an Air balloon bounce but I used this video 
to see the different between the weights of air and water. 
But I used my birthday balloon from a couple of months ago 
so most of the helium had escaped and it didn't bounce but that 
might of effected the result due to the small amount of helium on 
the wind drag.

4) Box Interaction (Short Story).

'Pied Piper: Outsmarted by Captive' (Box Story)

When Johny first looked at this animation he was surprised with the outcome. His words were 'that he wasn't expecting that'. This is because he thought it was going to be just a simple box interaction between two blocks (it is but with a twist at the end). It took me a couple of days (while I was off ill) to develop the animation. I struggled doing all the animation inside one Maya file so I made it in 8 files to reduce the size amount and the complications. I added some techniques to this animation that I learned from James' Maya skills workshop. For example, Texture mapping (When I was texturing a shed shape, adding textures on the separate faces [as seen in the video above]) I'm very impressed with what I could do now in Computer Generated animation from previous assignments in college:

The extra skills I learnt from this animation to the box interaction is how to use Maya and how to understand texture mapping in Maya. I proud of my skills getting better and better in animation.