Vanilla Ball Bounce

This Exercise is attached to: Animation Bootcamp

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

Interested in this Exercise?

Watch the course trailer to see what's inside, read the about tab, and then start your free trial of CG Cookie today.

Watch course trailer Start your free trial

Heya!

Start Your Free Trial

Software: Blender 2.78
Difficulty:

Everybody starts with a bounce.

OVERVIEW

This exercise is designed to be an application of the information learned in Chapter 2 of the Animation Bootcamp course. The assignment is to animate a simple ball bounce - "simple" meaning there's no squash or stretch and the motion is restricted to the Z-axis (up and down). This application will nail down the animation principle of slow-in and slow out.

INSTRUCTIONS

Download the Vanilla Ball Bounce: Source Files from the Downloads tab. Unzip and open the included .blend file with Blender.
Using only 3 keyframes and their f-curves, animate the ball bouncing up and down in a perpetual cycle.
Render your animation as an openGL viewport render loop. "Loop" means that the animation ends exactly how it begins so it can play seamlessly forever.
Loop your animation 5 times and export as a video file.
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

Only 3 keyframes are used.
2

Submission video contains 5 loops of the animation.
3

Animation is believable as a bounce.

s

Frame Counter Troubleshoot

3 answers · asked August 1, 2017 8:54pm

s

Jacob Phillips
3 answers · asked August 1, 2017 8:54pm

Frame Counter Troubleshoot

I'm following everything in this tutorial lesson and I get the ball bouncing nicely. However, I'm noticing that the "frame counter" is stuck at "01" in the camera display/render. How can I fix that?

3 Answers

Heya! Login with your CG Cookie Citizen Account to download Exercise files.

Start free trial

Needs your grading:
Graded:
Passed:
Did not pass:

← Previous 1 2 Next →

w Wayne Dixon

Level 6

Rank: 5

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.) Specialising in Blender with a high competency in Maya. I have successfully completed the feature animation and lighting workshops at iAnimate and and currently learning how to rig in Maya as well as I can in Blender. I also enjoy scripting in python and learning new skills.