Bowling Ball

From doing a lot of research i have found that the bowling ball drop is rather similar to the tennis ball drop - obviously there isn't the flexibility to squash and  stretch a bowling ball as there is with a tennis ball. But there is a high recoil from the first time it hits the floor like a tennis ball, and then each high of the recoil decreases alot which is unlike the tennis ball. I think this is due to the un-flexible nature of a bowling ball, its first landing hits the group with a such force that it has no where to go apart from back into the air - and then due to the weight of the bowling ball, each bounce afterwards is considerable less high as the upthrust and gravity ratio equalize. I am not a scientist so i could be completely wrong.... Anyhow - just to be extra sure of the key framing i have imported some reference footage into Adobe Premier Pro - i added the timecode effect with means i can see the film from frame to frame. I then added titles on the film so i can easily locate where the key frames are!...

Here is a link to my final reference footage:

Bowling Ball reference footage

I have to admit that i only found out how to download youtube files as video files after i actually made the bowling ball bounce. This is my bowling ball drop at the moment- This is fully exported and

Bowling Ball - Fully exported

This is only one of the view ports for the Bowling ball - i think i would like to add some more key frames to the bounce - maybe i will add a bit of a role at the end -  but i think it needs a bit of travel to make it look good, how ever i am fully aware not to make it role too much as it could make it look like the ball is on a slanted hill.

Tennis Ball Reference footage.

Luckily i was able to download some files from the internet of some reference material to help with the ball bounce. I managed to download this file which was made by my university. Here is the original file which i uploaded to my Vimeo account

Origional Tennis Ball Clip

I then imported this video to Adobe Premium Pro which is a programme where you can add certain affects like 'time code' and 'titles'. These make it easy for me to label where the key frames are to give me a good feel for how to recreate the film in Soft Image. This is the amended film i made to demonstrate the key frames.

Key Framed Tennis Ball Clip

I also thought it would be a good idea to look into how a tennis ball bounces in slow motion because i'm thinking that a tennis ball retracts into its self rather then actually morphing out e.g. squash and stretch. This is something that i cant recreate in soft image because to make it look like a realistic bounce i need to squash the ball, and the ball has a setting on it so it doesn't loose any volume.

Slow Motion Tennis Ball

Its actually so interesting - the bottom of the tennis ball hat has contact with the floor actually retracts inside itself which is perfectly feasible as it is a hollow ball.... So its interesting that we need to squash and stretch a ball to make it look realistic. Im going to use my drawings of the ball bounce as reference as well, im not quite confident to get stuck into it.

Shuttecock - MCU - CU

These are two films for my shuttlecock

[to be continued]

Shuttlecock Close UP

Shuttlecock Medium Close Up

Bowling Ball Diagrams

These are some of the thumb nails i have made for the bowling ball bounce - im really excited to get stuck in and i think that it will be quite successful (hope)

Shuttlecock aniamtion

Compared to the other two ball bounces I am much more interested by the way a shuttle cock falls. The way in which a shuttle cock bounces when it lands on the floor depends on the angle that the ball lands in comparison to the flexible structure - shown in the image above. The distance between the area in which the cork base hits the floor and the beginning of the flexible structure has a huge impact on how far and the direction of the bounce.

The way a shuttle cock bounces is more erratic then that of a bowling ball of tennis ball, and therefore you can get away with the direction of the bounce a little more then you would do with a bowling ball as its bounce is very rigid. Before i start to animate the bounce i want to look at different videos i can find online of a shuttle cock bouncing.

Initially i have come across how a shuttle cock would fly through the air. The ball always leads the way and lands first as it is the heaviest part of the object. If you hit a shuttle cock well you would hit the ball and therefore the ball has the most amount of force applied to it which means that it should be the fastest part of the object. Being made out of a cork structure this means that it has a lot of bounce.

The structure of cork : cork as a material has a lot of bounce, i have never looked into why is has such a bounce but i imagine that it has tiny particles or molecules of air - so small to the human eye that can cannot see them. These little molecules or particles give the cork movement, the pockets of air and squash when hitting an object and fill up again when no pressure is applied. This is why it is used as a lid for a bottle of wine etc. The air can be compressed out of the cork so that it is air tight. Much like when you go into sainsburys or any supermarket to buy some jam; the lids now have a extra tab on the top which when opened pops up, so as a customer you know when it has been opened. Corks are designed this way.

Structure of a cork:

I found this image online which is a microscopic image of a piece of cork. The demonstrates the tiny pocket of air that i assumed would be there to cause the elasticity of the object. You could see it as tiny little tennis balls all compounded into one object. However, due to the cramped nature of the air pockets they cannot repel against the floor as well as the tennis ball as the force of the bounce would travel through out the whole cork structure which would loose a lot of thrust energy. Where as with a tennis ball it only has to travel through itself - which is a empty shell.

To test this, i got ten tennis balls, placed them in a bag and tied it up tightly to allow minimal movement. I wanted to see how differently a tennis ball would bounce with other balls close. - They bounced well the the direction of the bounce was rather  off. Obviously this was only a small test, this is not a scientific test but it was interesting to see how it would work.

In Soft Image:

Video resources for ball bounces

Shuttle cock:

• How a shuttle cock flies in the air
• Previous farnham student

Tennis ball:

• ball bounce on different surfaces
• bounce height
• ** Slow mo or squash of tennis ball

Bowling ball:

• Bowling ball drop
• Bowling ball drop

JUST IF ANYONE IS INTERESTED :

This link - Golf Ball bounce is a link to a golf ball. I didnt think that it was squash or stretch, much like a bowling ball however after a lot of research i couldnt have been more wrong...

Research for Bowling ball drop

The bowling ball has been dropped from an approximate height of 1 metre

Animate the bowling ball entering the shot from the top demonstrating its characteristics.

Fully rendered shot (looped 3 times)

QuickTime format – h.264 – 1920x1080 square pixel 25fps

Research - 

•  Falling bowling ball

Timecode on After effects allows you to put a composition of a live bowling ball dropping and see the frame rate so i can accuraetly recreate the sequence.

• Facts
• A bowling ball weights between 2,7 to 7,3 kilograms.
• Bowling balls were made out of wood until the early 1900s.
• Bowling is the number one participation sport in America.
• The origins of bowling can be traced about 4,000 years back to Rome and Greece.

If a bowling ball and a tennis ball were dropped at the same height, assuming they have they same aerodynamic values, that is they are they same shape and same size they will hit the ground at the same time. Weight has nothing to do with it, only wind resistance does. Gravity's force is constant. No matter the weight it is 9.8 meters per second. The pull of gravity is the same on the bowling ball as on the tennis ball. You can take a cannon ball and a bowling ball, of the same size and they will fall at the same speed and hit the ground at the same time even though the bowling ball only weighs 7 pounds and the cannonball weighs 50 pounds.

This leads me to look into Newtons law of Gravitation, according to the Newton gravitation (remember that it's just an approximation), the force acting on a body of mass m₂ in r₂ caused by a body of mass m₁ in r₁ (in this case, the Earth) is 

F (force) = - G (gravitation) m₁m₂ (r₂ - r₁)/|r₂ - r₁|³, 
with G constant. 

Using the Newton equation for the body 2 (F = m₂ d²r₂/dt²), we have 
- G m₁m₂ (r₂ - r₁)/|r₂ - r₁|³ = m₂ d²r₂/dt² → 

→ - G m₁ (r₂ - r₁)/|r₂ - r₁|³ = d²r₂/dt². 

Now, if you assume that r₁ = 0 and consider bodies that are not too distant from the ground, you may approximate r₂ = r_T + r (r_T is the Earth radius) with r_T, that is a constant. And so the acceleration of any body is

d²r/dt² = d²⁽r_T + r)/dt² ≈ - G m₁ r_T/|r_T|³,


and so you see this acceleration is constant (it's the famous "g"), independent from the mass m₂ of the falling body. (Note that, even without our assumptions, the acceleration does not depend on m₂: this is due to the form of Newton gravitation law and Newton equation, and it is the heart of the equivalence between gravitational and inertial mass).  

*** There is a difference between speed (or velocity) and acceleration. They are, of course, related, but acceleration is the rate of change of velocity. When you are sitting in your car at a red light and the light turns green and you step on the gas (or accelerator!), your car accelerates from zero to some final velocity (hopefully not much more than the posted speed limit). Your speedometer clearly shows the change in velocity as the needle moves clockwise. The faster that needle moves, the greater the acceleration. 
On Earth, objects do not fall at constant speed, as your question suggests. Gravity accelerates objects toward the center of the Earth at 32.2 ft per second per second (which can also be written as 32 ft/s²). In other words, an object's velocity will increase by 32.2 ft/s (or 9.8 m/s) for each second the object falls until it reaches its terminal velocity, which you can think of as a kind of speed limit. Terminal velocity is reached when air friction equally opposes the force of gravity. Different objects will have different terminal velocities, depending upon their shapes.  ***

Imagine you are on top of a tall building and holding a bowling ball over the side of the building. At time t = 0 seconds, you let go of the ball. At that exact moment, the ball is traveling at 0 ft/s, but as the ball experiences gravity without your holding it, it starts to fall. After one second, the ball will be traveling 32.2 ft/s. After two seconds, it is traveling 64.4 ft/s, and after three seconds, it is traveling at 96.6 ft/s. 
So you see that falling objects do not fall at the constant rate of 32.2 feet per second but actually accelerate -- that is, pick up speed -- at a rate of 32.2 feet per second per second. 

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Does_gravity_pull_things_down_32.2_feet_per_second