Animation Mentor Assignment Two! Part Two

Here it is, part two of my Animation Mentor assignment. This time you get to see some actual animation!

So our very first animation assignment was the classic Bouncing Ball Animation! I've previously done this assignment before, first in 2D and then again in 3D. Despite this I was still very excited for this animation, and I'm very happy with how it turned out! We had to animate a ball with the same weight as a basketball or as a soccer ball, so I went ahead and grabbed a soccer ball and filmed some reference, which you can see here!

After filming my reference I planned out my animation in my sketchbook. I had an idea as to what I wanted to do before I filmed the reference, so the reason I did my sketch afterwards was so I could take not of the timing I would need.

I went ahead and matched my animation so it was similar to the reference I shot. Then with some help from Chelsea, I was able to get my rotation to look pretty natural thanks to a tip she learned when she was in Class 01. Finally with some great feedback from my Peer Buddy Lorenzo, I ended up with this!

I was quite happy with how this turned out. I feel that this bounce was a lot more realistic than the other ball bounces I had done in the past. During this weeks Critique, my mentor said that he liked the sense of weight I had, but he wanted me to adjust the timing a little bit and also have it so the ball comes to a halt, rather than rolling off screen. I'll be doing a revision to this bounce after I finish this weeks assignment, so I'll update this post with the updated shot!

Here are the other three ball bounces I did previously when I was in the Character Animation program at UCF.

Oh before I forget, I have two more cool things to tell you! The first is I got a comment from one of Animation Mentors founders, Bobby Beck, on my ball bounce! Bobby works for Pixar and only commented on a handful of peoples assignments (including Lindsey's!) so this totally made my day when I saw it!

And the final thing is I just signed up for my next class! I got Jon Collins, who has worked on Star Wars Return of the Sith, Ice Age 2, Wall-E, Up, Toy Story 3, Brave, and more! I'm super excited that I got him because his class filled up super fast!

Alright thats it for this post! As always enjoy!

~Josh