Ball Bounce

The arcs are much better on this version. There is still some problems with the timing on the downward arcs. You could probably add one more inbetween on each of the bottom half of each of the downward arcs. As it's playing now, it has that paaaaaauuse, zip action too it. Adding another drawing on the down will even the spacing out some. With the pause, zip the ball is starting to feel alive.

Timing will come with practice. It's esspecially hard to get when you're starting out, and with flipbooks since you can't really flip and roll index cards.

Keep up the good work.

Aloha,
the Ape

As of now, I shoot most of my animations in threes. I'm lazy. Is that your first animation in your course?

Give you ball a floor to bounce off of. Draw the path you wont to ball to travel, keeping in mind the speed of the ball, divide the path into how every many frames you think you will need to get the ball to the end.

Leave the cute stuff for later, for now focus on the project of a bouncing ball.
I am thinking that you should make your ball travel its path in 16 frames for a two second scene shot on threes. Unless you are going for 30 frames per second, then make the proper adjustments.

consider timing and read up on timing/spacing charts. Its not enough to have the right amount of drawings in the right amount of exposure but the spacing of them makes a difference i.e: as things accelorate the drawings become farther apart, as it slows-in; closer together.

The only places i've seen 3s is in Tv Anime and in traditional only if the keys are really tight and a character is moving verrrry slowly but that's rare.

Twos are good for average speed. Ones if your action is fast and requires detail or you are interacting with live-action.

Leave the cute stuff for later

While you're right about the timing and spacing, being creative with your assignments is ESSENTIAL with being good. Without creativity, what are you in an artistic field? You'll end up in inbetweening/cleanup for the rest of your life unless your fearless and creative.

While you're right about the timing and spacing, being creative with your assignments is ESSENTIAL with being good. Without creativity, what are you in an artistic field? You'll end up in inbetweening/cleanup for the rest of your life unless your fearless and creative.

Yes, but not at the sacrifice of learning the animation principles. I won't care how creative something is if the animation basics are half assed. Get the basics down pat in your intro classes. Once you have that solid foundation to build on, then experiment and let your imagination run wild.

Hanna, watch your arcs on the ball bounce. The spacing as well. But these are the things that you'll learn in this class. For your first assignment, this was a good job. Keep up the good work, and have fun.

Aloha,
the Ape

So the first image I've plotted out the spacing and the path of your ball bounce. I changed the color each time it changes direction so it's easier to read. I also noted on a couple of frames there you shot that frame for longer than normal, 3-5 frames. All the rest you seemed to have been shooting on 2s and 1s. I also noted those because they tended to happen on the downward path of the arc when the ball starts speeding up and now holding in mid downward arc.

Also you can see that you're arcs are a little off. The green pass had the nicest arc of the bunch. The red pass was a bit flat. Also the crest of those arcs should be higher, esspecially the initial drop into frame. The blue pass is covering too much horizontal distance. The ball is slowing down and losing energy, so both the height of the bounce and distance of the bounce should deminish with each bounce.

A good way to figure out the height to distance relationship is by first figuring out the distance you want the ball to bounce horizontally on your ground plain. This doesn't include any roll at the end you might add. Mark that point on the paper. Now go to the starting height of your first bounce and draw a line between the two points. These are now the tops of your arcs. When the tops of the arcs reach the distance point on the ground plain, the ball stops bouncing.

The second image is more like how your arcs should be. I raised the starting bounce and moved around some of the contact points. It's not perfect, the starting height is a bit high for one, but you can get the basic idea.

I hope this helps you out some.

Aloha,
the Ape

Just to explain, the reason I loathe them is that exercises are not valuable in themselves; they are meant to teach something. If one already understands what they're meant to teach, one doesn't need to do the exercise. On the other hand, if one doesn't, doing the exercise might be a very good idea. The best drawing exercise is to draw.

...Sorry, but I just can't get excited about bouncing balls...

Like most things, learning the basics of animation aren't very fun. Sure, ball bounces aren't very glamorous, but learning them is critical if you want to be any sort of decent character animator. Ball bounces are easy to do, but they're hard to do well. What the ball bounce teaches are, maintaining volume, weight, timing, spacing, arcs, and material properties. These are all things you will draw upon later in your animation life wether you are animating an emotional scene with a character emoting or a cup knocked off a table.

There are two reasons the ball bounce is made to be a boring excersize. One is that it strips away all the fluff so that new animators can concentrate on these basic with out getting distracted by clothes, faces, limbs and the like. I would hate to go to the first day in class, having never animated before, and my first assignment be a low camera angle and a character in a jester costume doing cartwheels towards the camera. You won't learn anything with that excersize.

And reason two is that you will more often than not have to animate boring things in your future. They won't be the money shot, but you will still have to put in effort and animate it well. So it teaches you pride in your work.

Don't worry, the assignments will get fun and challenging soon enough Hanna. And when they do and you have to make a character act, by then all you'll have to worry about is the performance, and all the basics will be second nature. Thats when the fun begins and you can concentrate on making your animation really sing.

Aloha,
the Ape

I'm a professional animator Laurence. I know there is different ways to learn and everyone learns differently. But one thing I know for sure, is studios will never hire an animator that doesn't know the basics of animation. Maybe as a character designer or storyboarder. As an animator, you need to know this stuff. Believe me, I've seen a lot of student and amature animation. You can always tell the ones that have a solid foundation of animation principles and those that focus on certain things they liked. The later usually has something really nice going on, like nice flowing hair or a cape, while the character moves stiff and awkward.

In this day and age animation is easy to do. Anyone can get free software and models, make things move and post it on the web. To make that character come to life, that is hard.

I can never stress enough how important it is to learn the basics first. Learn it well now, and you can build upon them later.

Aloha,
the Ape

This has gone a bit off topic, and most of it's my fault. Laurence, how about we just agree that we have different ways of approaching animation and leave it at that.

Let us know how you did on your assignment Hanna.

Aloha,
the Ape