Bouncing Ball

 

This assignment involved animating a bouncing ball that interacted with multiple objects and demonstrating knowledge of how the ball's arc and shape would be influenced by such objects. I had a lot of different ideas for how to frame the ball's movement during this assignment, but the idea I eventually settled on was recreating a simple pachinko machine. Here, a spring pulls back and launches a ball into the air, where it knocks on several pegs before eventually settling into a hole at the bottom of the machine.

After drafting the arc and frame-by-frame positions for the ball, I begin building the background. I decided to keep it relatively static so that more emphasis would be placed on the movement of the ball and spring. If I had more time for this assignment, it would have been nice to color the background so that the visual theming is clearer (I'll explain more about this later). Animating the spring ended up being trickier than I expected, because I simultaneously wanted the animation to be snappy and not take up too much time, while needing as many frames as possible to sell the pullback of the spring. Trying to animate the ball as well so that it had a realistic arc downwards while never colliding with the spring until it was pushed upwards also took a lot of redoing.

If I had any misgivings with this project, it would be that my choice of framing meant I had to limit myself on squash and stretch or impact on any of the objects in order to maintain realism. Even the simplest of pachinko machines tend to be made of wood or plastic, with balls being made of metal, so there wouldn't be much visible reaction to impact. It's something people might not be familiar with when looking at a black-and-white animation, which is why I wanted to color the background if I had time. I did end up exaggerating this a bit by making the ball stretch slightly while travelling at fast speeds (and I actually worked on making the pins squash and stretch upon the ball's impact, as if they were rubber, for a while before eventually dropping the idea). If I had a second go at the concept of animating a bouncing ball, I would probably choose something that allows me to exaggerate the ball's ability to squash and stretch more.