Another Attempt at Tennis Ball Bounce

Attempt 1 Medium Close Up - Bouncing on the spot

Attempt 1 Close Up - Bouncing on the spot

The two links above are videos of my first fully rendered attempt at the tennis ball. I felt it was important for me to get the bounce right before i made the balls move in a certain direction. Also i have to admit - i had seen other students work and they made their balls bounce in a direction rather then on the same spot, which is what i make the tennis ball do in the videos above.

When i was first given the task to make the ball bounces, i heard my 3D tutor tell another student that the ball shouldn't role too much as it would make it look like the ball is on a slope and therefore the travel shouldn't be a large distance. I interpreted that as the balls should bounce on the spot. REALISTICALLY..... if you 'dropped' a tennis ball from a height - it would just bounce near enough on the same spot. If you bounced the ball then it would bounce in the direction you intended to bounce the ball in!! The brief says to animate a shuttlecock bowling ball and tennis ball that has been dropped from a height of 1 metre. So logically if would only bounce on the spot - but due to worry i thought i would go one on the spot and one bouncing in a direction.

On my second attempt i was much more confident

Second Attempt Close Up

Second Attempt Medium Close Up

I think that the squash and stretch is much better in my second attempt then in my first. But i really struggled with the spacing out of each bounce in soft image - i struggled to get them quite right and you can see on one of the bounces jumps a much further distance then the previous bounces. Now if the brief had been - make a ball bounce on the spot and then one where the ball is a character - then this would probably have worked. I have to say that i did find the rig rather hard to use as the tennis ball could only squash and stretch at one point - so if i rotated the ball and it landed on a lets say the top right hand corner so (2 o'clock.) The squash at the balls land would be in the wrong place in accordance to the spin. Therefore you have to be careful with how much you rotate the ball, and also the height of each bounce. To work around this i only added one major squash and stretch and one small. This meant it was easier for me to control and i didn't have to muck around too much over rotating the ball to make sure it worked out for me. I am happy with the way the ball bounces but i am not happy with the distance between each bounce. They are too far apart in certain points and too close in others. I wont have time to redo this again at the moment because i want to have another go at re doing the bowling ball and concentrate on the action piece again!