Second and Final Bowling Ball bounce

Okay, so after looking into making my bowling ball move i have made a second fully rendered bowling ball drop. I did this to the tennis ball mainly due to what my tutor said but also because i have seen other people working on their ball drops and they have bounced in a direction.

Bowling Ball CU

Bowling Ball MCU

I am really pleased with this second attempt. I think i spaced it out better then the tennis ball. And i am pleased with the drop and the way the ball fades out in speed, although i think the end of the roll could have been longer. On the whole i think it is much better now!

Rendering out ball bounces

Initially I got rather confused by the process in which you render out the animations. Initially I thought you had  to capture your animation which you do by pressing the little camera icon at the top of the window, scroll down to capture, and capture it out to QuickTime  This worked perfectly, I then tried to upload it to Vimeo which didn't work. After research I found that to upload your bounced to Vimeo you have to render out the animation.

When rendering out the animation on softimage, it renders the animation in a image sequence - this means that instead of it coming out as a video or QuickTime file it exports into photographs. This subsequently means that once the rendering is finished we then have to import all of the image files into After Effects, place them in the correct sequence in a time like and then export that AE project into a QuickTime clip. If you do it in this process there seems to be more benefits, you get the correct lighting on the balls as well as shadowing.

I have now learnt that the purpose of the capturing tool is rather for looking at what you have animated rather then producing your final clip. This is because some 3D software struggle to churn out all of the frames in your timeline. This could be due to the file size being too big so the programme skips some  frames to make it play at Real Time. When exporting your clip you have to make sure that the RT button selection at the bottom is on, other wise the programme will export the animation as 'all' frames. This means that the animation will play as quickly as possible as the computer allows it.

Tennis Ball Final Versions

This is the final version of the tennis ball - i will upload all the different versions i made when finishing this ball bounce. However, after doing the reference video i didnt actually have to do too many versions to get it looking okay.

Below is the links to both of my renders - Close up and Medium Close up.

Tennis Ball Close Up

Tennis Ball Medium Close Up

Im actually rather pleased with the out come - i do think that it could be a little quicker at the come downs at the height of every bounce, i copied the video reference frame for frame so i was a little baffled as to why this was happening. I think that the bounce of the ball its good, although i think that maybe it sticks a bit too much on every down - maybe i could make the frame after the touch with the ground higher/ further away from the touching frame. This would make the ball appear less sticky.

I went back and looked through my frame work and infact i had done this. So maybe its that i made the bounce back too slow? Its getting rather late now so i am going to call it a night and look at it tomorrow with fresh eyes - ill give a better evaluation then.

First Bowling Ball

This is only one pass of my first fully rendered version of the bowling ball.

Bowling Ball First attempt

This is my first attempt at the bowling ball - I used to reference footage which i included in a previous comment's about the bowling ball to help me make this as accurate as possible. 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 bowling 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.

So that is why i animated the bowling ball dropping on the same spot. Anyway i thought i would give it a go, similarly like i did with the tennis ball! Im going to make the ball bounce in the sense of frames very similar to the first attempt. I will use the reference footage again that i included on a previous post but i will try and make the bounce slightly better spaced then the tennis ball bounce. Im thinking i could slightly move the spacing for each bounce of the bowling ball and just make it roll at the end? This maybe easier to animate and look more realistic. I wont animate the roll too much because i don't want it to make it make it seem like the ball is on a slope.... It should be much easier to animate the roll compared to the tennis ball because i can squash and stretch the bowling ball at any point, there isn't any restrictions! Bonus!!

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