Character Ball

This Exercise is part of the course: Blender Animation Bootcamp

Part of the Learning Flow:

Animation in Blender

Chapter 1: Developing Your Eye
Learning to animate is learning to see.
Chapter 2: Everything is a Bouncing Ball
Complex animation is a collection of its simple animations. And those simple animations can almost always be analyzed as bouncing balls.
Chapter 3: More Ball Animation Goodness
Not so fast - I'm not done teaching you everything there is learn from bouncing balls!
Chapter 4: Let's not forget Squash & Stretch
This is the last chapter focusing on ball animation. Who knew there was so much to learn from balls?
Chapter 5: Into the Character Realm
We're diving into characters at this point. In this chapter, we cover one more animation principle and introduce you to the VonnBots!
Chapter 6: Can you walk the walk?
Summon all your animation skills to create believable and appealing walk cycles for the Stomp and Rivet VonnBots.
Chapter 7: In Closing
Congrats on finishing the course! If you're wondering where to go from here, this video from Wayne answers that question.
- What Next? 2 min

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Watch the course trailer to see what's inside, read the about tab, and then start learning on CG Cookie today.

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Software: Blender 2.78
Difficulty:

A ball becomes a character

OVERVIEW

This exercise is designed to be an application of the information learned in Chapter 4 of the Animation Bootcamp course. The assignment is to breath life into a ball through animation. More than mere physical behavior, you're to give the ball a will; a mind. Animate the ball approaching the platform, move across it in a series of jumps, peer over the edge, and finally decide to jump off to land on the ground.

INSTRUCTIONS

Download the Character Ball: Source Files from the Downloads tab and open the unzipped .blend file with Blender.
Animate the ball as a character traversing the platform like it has a will, is capable of analyzing its surroundings, and makes decisions - Like you see in the example above. Have fun with this. At least mimic what you see in the example. But also consider making your ball character do a unique action that still gives the illusion of life.
Render your animation as an openGL viewport render.
Upload your video to YouTube or Vimeo.
Finally, submit your exercise by clicking the Submit Exercise button in the top-right corner of this page and pasting your video's URL.

Rules of the Exercise

1

Animation is appealing and makes the ball act like a living, breathing character rather than just a ball.
2

Submission is in video format.
3

Uses the .blend file provided.

Tracking the top and bottom of the ball

2 answers · asked March 22, 2018 4:14pm

Hunter & Tiff Eidmann
2 answers · asked March 22, 2018 4:14pm

Tracking the top and bottom of the ball

Is there any way to track the x and z position of the top and bottom of the ball? I would like to use the coordinates to accurately place the spacing which becomes hard when I am squashing and stretching.

Edit: Also, is there an animation speed control? I would like to watch my project play through at half speed to make it easier to pick out mistakes. Thanks!

2 Answers
k

Inverting multiple values on the graph editor

2 answers · asked March 12, 2018 10:07pm

k

Jacob Watson
2 answers · asked March 12, 2018 10:07pm

Inverting multiple values on the graph editor

For reasons I don't quite understand, the direction the ball rig rotates changed halfway through animating, and I haven't found a way to fix it without messing up other parts of the animation (such as the squash & stretch). Is there any way to reverse all selected values in the graph editor at once? Also, what do you think could be the reason for the inverted rotation?
As to what I was editing at the time, I was putting in a new rotation on the ball, only to find when I played the entire animation back that everything but the part I just edited had reversed direction (but not value).

2 Answers

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Wayne Dixon

Level 8

Rank: 6

Since 2009, I have been producing high quality character animations for everything from commercials to children's music videos. Working remotely for several small studios, I have been responsible for the rigging and animation of several videos that have received over 100 million views on Youtube. (Making for some very happy clients.)