Skip to main content

Ball bounce - Maya

I think one of the most important things of animation is having good references, I've spoken to a lot of other class mates and they give me the feeling that using references is inferior in a way, which I understand, doing things completely from memory is certainly impressive but for me I'm not even close the skill level to be able to draw from memory let alone animate from memory. I say this because I was struggling to find good references on the Internet for ball bounces, I was a bit flabbergasted by this as with years of animation students coming throughout the world you would of thought there would of be an abundance of good ball bounce references. I did in the end find a really good video with multiple bounces and that's what I went off. 




We haven't really dove into deep in Maya so what we've been tasked with hasn't given me a headache but just time taken up, mostly me having fiddles with what looks right and usually going too far and it ends up looking wrong, then having to go back a few steps to what I had before and the vicious cycle repeats and repeats. I started off the a tennis ball, it wasn't on the sheet of the brief (Joe if you're reading this don't kill me) but when I think of a ball bouncing I think of a tennis ball so I went with what would be most comfortable for my brain. 




The bounce was super straight forward, however looking back I think I keep the ball floating the in the air on the bounce for a bit too long, I like the exaggerated effect but in terms of realism it isn't accurate. I was really enjoying this as I do with most Maya experiments so I went on to the next the ball which was a bowling ball. This wasn't in the video reference i was using but it was in the TED talk on blackboard. Again it was pretty straight forward but I did struggle on the making the ball fall realistically and I still don't think it looks completely accurate. I also added a slight spin on the both the balls as well the ball coming to a stop. I personally think they look pretty good, but I think getting Johnny, Joe or James' opinion could steer me in the right direction.

balls sample test 1 from muntasir chowdhurry on Vimeo.



tennis ball + bowling ball 1 from muntasir chowdhurry on Vimeo.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Trying to give triangles life

I knew Chris was going to be in the afternoon lecture and i hadnt gotten much round to doing any character designs for script to screen, mainly because they were traingles and i didn't think it would be too difficult. When i got round to it i was struggling to give the characters personality and they just looked really flat. I experimented with creating more complicated designs using a verity of triangles but because the story i had in mind was light hearted and comedic i thought it'd be best to keep with a more cartoonty simple style. Howver i was still left with the problem of the designs looking lifeless When lecture came about chris thought it'd be best to go back to basics and focus on gesture lines and had us in groups create actions and to draw them out. I enjoyed working with my group, but talking to people after class it seemed like half the class didn't enjoy it which kind of baffled me Near the end of class i got chris to look at my des...

Creative play with digital media students

The day began in the maker space, along with the digital media students. The digital media tutor called Mark explained to us that we were going to be placed randomly selected groups and make a tower only using paper and no other materials. My team was nice however they were quite quiet, me and Decland tried to lead the conversation and get everyone talking and sharing, they opened up a but but even by the end of the day some members of the group weren't really talking. The first task was building the tallest tower using only paper and no other materials and at the top of the tower an egg for fifteen seconds. I felt like only half of our group were trying to work quickly and because we were working at a slightly slower pace to other groups it hindered the potential of the final product. As a team we decided that it was best to have the egg protected so it wouldn't die.  With our team being number one we were made to present first, and then we were told it would be measured f...

Video Essay

I knew it would be best starting off before getting into editting that gathering some knowlege these two videos were pretty useful even though i didnt use any after effects but its useful to know that i can easily work between them Looking at other peoples making of videos as well as the stuff Annabeth posted on Blackboard i was pretty confident in what i needed to do. So i started writing down what footage along with what i wanted to say Gathering the footage was a bit tedious, and i tried to cut out footage that i didn't need, i felt like the 3 minute mark was a good place, not too long not too short.   I thought id had confidecne with my voiceover but it was horrible, i was lucky that the room i recorded in had good aucoustics and it doesnt sound ultra horrible  i was pretty happy with how the video essay turned out even though its a bit cringe