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.