John W. Vanderbeck

Now that we’ve finished modeling and riggin our Teen Titan styled characters, we’ve set them aside for a week or so to cover animation fundamentals. Our toons are ready to be animated, but first we have to learn about animation :) Over the next week we will be doing animation excercises with basic objects such as balls. These excercises are designed to teach us the important core concepts of animation. Things like timing, weight, anticipation, follow-through, and the like.

Our first project is the animation of a ball rolling off of a table and bouncing across the screen. This is a rather simple animation but one that is teaching us all sorts of important concepts. To begin with we’re learning the ins and outs of the animation TOOLS in Lightwave, as well as things like the dope sheet and graph editor. It is also teaches us things such as timing and weight. At this point we aren’t doing any squash or stretch, but we will be getting into that later. In this project its a matter of making the ball feel as though it has weight to it, and getting a good grasp of timing as the ball’s velocity decays slowly over time, and the bouncing arcs decay as well.

It sounds really simple, but i’ve restarted the project a couple times already. Its really a perceptual thing. The first major problem I was having was that the ball did not seem to be losing velocity throughout the animation. It sort of did, but not really. I modified my curves and everythign as instructed, using things like tension to make the ball ease in/out of the arcs. This gave the feel of weight as desired, but the ball’s overall velocity seemed to be relativly constant. I simply coulnd’t figure out what I was doing wrong!

It was a matter of timing and spacing. I was missing the fact that I had to increase the TIME between bounces. By increasing the time between each bounce, the ball appears to slow down, thus losing velocity. Painfully obvious in hindsight, but I find it interesting that my mind just didin’t see it on its own. I was tweaking the hell out of those curves and frame VALUES, but totally missing the important concept of TIME until it was pointed out to my by Eddie, the teaching assistant. Thanks Eddie!

When I get home from work i’ll be polishing this up then posting it here for you all to enjoy :) I’m also considering doing a Video Modeling session to illustrate this vital point. Stay tuned :)