Bouncing Ball - 3D
Below is the finished versions of the both the ball across the screen and ball with tail shots. These shots were achieved using the 3D software program, Maya 2011. Below are some images showing both shots in progress.
This simple shot was created using a NURB sphere which was animated using keyframes in position and height (X,Y,Z) To ease in and ease out on certain keyframes, I had to use a graph editor which kept a record of all the keyframes that I created in the sequence.
An image of a rendered frame.
Ball with tail - 3D
I used a pre-made ball and tail model that was recommended for this sequence. I animated the ball first so I would know how the tail would move and react in correspondence to the ball's movement. After I completed the movement of the ball, I animated the tail using a series of rigs that came with the model.
Notice how the ball is stretched and bent to a certain angle. I applied a nonlinear deformer to achieve this effect in order to give the ball a bit more character. Also the squash and stretch technique is applied as the ball impacts with the steps on each bounce.
I like to note that there has been some technical difficulties with the rendering process. For some reason, the laptop refused to successfully convert the frames into a supportable file. I attempted to produce the sequence in Quicktime, Tiff and Targa format, yet the files were still in a unreadable format. So I had no other alternative but to render each individual frame in JPEG format for about 871 frames, which took several hours to complete. Very exhausting and frustrating but I managed to successfully collect all frames and import them into After Effects to convert them into a Quicktime movie.
Here is the ball across screen shot with time code, looped several times.
This is the ball with tail shot. With this shot, I decided to make it more interesting by using camera movements similar to live action. Notice as the ball and tail overcomes its obstacle course, the camera locks onto it in a sort of tracking shot.
