Week 1: Bouncing Ball Animation Exercise – Maya

Some essential animation techniques and key points I learned while creating a bouncing ball animation in Maya.

1.Setting up a Maya Project

For each project, it’s important to create a project file and place the appropriate files in the correct folders. Before starting any project, click: File > Project Window > New, then enter the project name, check the location, and click Accept.

• Scenes: This folder stores primary Maya scene files (e.g., .ma or .mb files). Any 3D model, animation, or layout. Or put reference rigging files by creating a subfolder in scene folder.

• Images: This folder can store the render images.

• Sourceimages: Store all textures, image of the output of materials, or some external image files of scene references.

• Autosave: Maya will store autosave files in this folder if the autosave function is available.

2.Import the rigging file of ball – reference

file – reference – reference editor

3. Find suitable reference and make a plan

Find reference video to observe the rules of movement, the rhythm of movement ball reflect and hit the ground.

Plan sketch 1：

Playblast 1:

During the process, I encountered some challenges, such as the speed at which the ball rotates, whether the contact with the ground affects the rotation speed. And I should reserve enough frames to adjust the squash and stretch.

In my first attempt, the result was not ideal because the number of frames from the ball’s first drop to the impact with the ground was limited, which resulted in no frames to demonstrate the gradual stretching of the ball.

Therefore, I prepared a second plan to reduce the total number of times the ball hits the ground.

Plan sketch 2 – Reduce the number of hits to the ground：

Frame 1 – 50：The ball is thrown with great force, causing it to bounce very high in this phase. At this point, the ball’s movement speed is the greatest among the three stages, and then it gradually decreases.

Frame 51 – 89：The ball’s energy has significantly decreased, which causes less variation along the y-axis, meaning the bounce height becomes lower. Additionally, as the ball’s highest point gets closer to the ground, the frequency of the ball hitting the ground increases.

Frame 90 – 100：The ball no longer bounces; it gradually rolls forward and finally stops.

Playblast 2:

In my second attempt, I aimed to minimize the number of bounces for the ball to make the most of each frame.

Review link: https://syncsketch.com/sketch/YTMyMzNiODli/