Howdy!
For my most recent assignment for my 3D animation class, we had to animate two balls bouncing and impacting with each other with different ball weights. For my assignment, I used a basketball and beach ball.
This assignment was really fun to work on! Sure, Maya crashed on me about 10 times and made me start saving my project every 5 minutes, but it really helped me get used to the controls. It somewhat hard trying to get the balls to interact in a natural way. It did not help that I was animating the balls on the Global setting, which is a huge no-no and basically means I’m moving the whole world around them. There are some things I want to fix with this animation. With the basketball, it almost seems to brace for impact when hitting the beach ball when it shouldn’t do that and it could gain more from having more rotation. With the beach ball, it could use some more rotation and a few more bounces after it makes the impact.
Even with the few things that need improvement, I still very much enjoyed doing this. There’s something nice about animation and being the one to give life to an object.
Doing 3D animation again really motivates me to try out and do some other types of animation, specifically 2D. I have so many ideas I want to try out animating, and really hope I’m able to find the time for them at some point!
Our next assignment is to do a pendulum swing, which seems to be very fun! We just have to move an object forward, give it an abrupt stop, and make it swing!
Thanks for reading!
~ Isaiah Williams