Session 104 - Heavy & Light Ball Bounce

So, this week our assignment was to create an animation of two balls bouncing, one that is light and one that is heavy. I chose to do something like a bowling ball and a ping pong ball. So first I went and bought some ping pong balls and bounced them around for a while. I didn't want to buy a bowling ball though, but I was able to find some good video reference on youtube. This was incredibly helpful and I think is the reason I was able to get it looking so heavy in the end.

After the observation I did some rough sketches of how I wanted it to work, then I went and animated the heavy ball alone. This was a bit easier for the way I was doing it because basically I wanted the ping pong ball to be bouncing around and hitting off the bowling ball but for the bowling ball to not really be affected by it. After I had the heavy ball pretty much down, I put the light ball in and just kinda let it go where it wanted to. I had to adjust the timing to get it to bounce in the right place to hit the heavy ball, but it ended up working out alright. Not exactly how I sketched it, but that's probably a good thing if you look at my sketches. Here they are:

Final Heavy/Light Ball Bounce Sketch:


So, as you can see it is pretty freaking confusing, and not exactly what I ended up with. I tried to give it color so it was less confusing, but that only gets you so far. Anyhow, here's the final ball bounce!

Final Heavy/Light Ball Bounce:


I think this turned out pretty well. Ping pong balls bounce around a hell of a lot in real life. This would have been very hard to do if we were supposed to work in all 3 dimensions. yipes. Oh, also, there was no pose assignment this week. Sorry! Maybe next week!