Click image above to play the animation.
Friday, August 18, 2006
Animation Principles Assignment 13
This was another weight/bouncing assignment, this time animating a bouncing balloon. The additional challenge here was to turn the balloon while it was falling. Originally, I did every frame manually. The results weren't very good - I over-tweaked the bouncing motion. The second version I did, posted here, used Flash's motion, inbetween and slo-in/out tools. I drew a motion path, plotted a few keyframes and then used trial and error to get the timing satisfactory. No surprise that the second version didn't take me anywhere near as long to do.
Click image above to play the animation.
Click image above to play the animation.
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3 comments:
Jimmy,
Here are some suggestions for your exercise. The balloon is filled with air or some other gas. So it most likely will rise slowly being tossed about by the wind until it reaches a maximum altitude. Then as it begins to react to gravity it will fall slowly catching a breeze here and there that will cause it to float back and forth as it desends rising slightly and then falling as it hits each bit of air current until it reaches the floor where it will bounce back up and fall over and over probably tumbling along through a long decaying series of bounces until eventually it comes to a rest. So you may want to go back and try this again with the overall screen time being significantly longer. You want to show more of the floating and the effects of the air currents on the balloon as well as the force of hitting the ground and how the very light balloon would take a long time both to fall and to settle. Keep up the great work, these are only suggestions for you to consider.
JK, thank you for your helpful comments. No surprise, you're right on the money. Brian suggested in part of this assignment to actually get balloon and see what it does. I, as evidenced here, neglected to do that. I have my reasons, none of them plausible. So, I got a regular, breath-inflated model and watched and timed. I did this indoors, so no breezes (none that I'll admit to anyway). For my balloon, the average time from being dropped from about 5 ft. onto carpet until no movement was about 9 seconds with as you put it, a long decaying series of bounces. I think my animation clocked in at about 5 seconds so I'm way off. During these end bounces, the balloon is also turning around, something else I didn't do. Oh yes, much room for improvement.
Jimmy,
If there weren't much room for improvement, what fun would there be in learning a new skill? Your approach is excellent and with time and persistance your results will follow.
Observation is critical to animating, an early and important lesson to learn is that references are not a crutch or a cheat but a necessary resource. Also please read my latest blog article on thunbnails and gestures, even though it may seem more oriented to character animation, it actually applies to all forms in that working loose and not worrying about all of the visual details frees you up to focus on your movements and timing first and then the details can be added later.
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