bouncing ball test cg-part 4

Part 4 animation ready

Now that we have a object, stage set, and simple controls, its time to animate a simple ball bounce.  Since a  free falling body can be calculated with  a gravity equation- we can initially set positions of our animation using numbers  see the charts below..

the windows for animation can be set or come from a standard animation page in the scene pulldown.  In the below page we can insert key frames using the  armature bones. The Armature has the ability to move and scale in y direction (squash) to add character to the  bounce on top of the simulated numbers...

okay here is the ball bounce- 

bouncing ball test-cg part 2&3

Creating the objects for the scene seem simple enough- you declare the object, add a material or shader and we can easily see our progress in the 3d port with textured as material type. But how do we prepare for animation?... The next step is preparing the camera as well as adding controls to the ball for easier animation...

part 2 identifying stage size and zoom,

For this clip we want to identify the stage and camera so we don’t see edges of the stage and keep the ball in view during the animation so we punch “0” on numpad or simulate key pad function for lab-top to identify the camera location.  Below we can see set up for light, stage, and camera in solid mode and rendered mode

the camera set of the scene looks can be manipulating by selecting and pressing "g" and move into position

part 3 simple rigging of your ball for easy animation

Okay we got our stage and animating object available to use. Now we could just start animating using just center location of our ball- but if we choose some simple controls there will be less correction needed during animation.  For this part I will add an simple armature bone to the scene and have the ball object parented to it.  This armature was positioned at the floor even with the background object and the ball’s lowest point was positioned at this pivot. This was set so if the ball were simulate to bounce and squash the “0” location was mentioned then the ball would be kissing the floor instead of inside the floor as is the default value- making sure all translations are applied help as well- this are see in the location/rotation and scale boxes.

bouncing ball test-cg part 1

I figured I needed to work on my animation skills so I wanted to created a bouncing ball to test out my timing.  This ball should have several properties.  The look of a beach ball (uv mapped color textures). It should have simple controls for animation (a simple armature system).  It should be used in a  animation short  showing some physical simulation and character....

part 1 modeling- and texturing

Creating the beach ball look. using Blender 2.65

The purpose of the look for these purposes is to be able to animate the form without too much of a lag in render time, so a simple texturing set using UV maps was considered.  A sphere primitive was created with 16 X16 spans

Marking seams on the  UV sphere in order to create the UV map was next step

The next step is to open up a UV image window along side the  3d window and while selecting all vertices of the sphere perform unwrap  this created a layout that can be exported into photoshop

I brought this image into photoshop and colored it up to match up to the uv plan and the look of a beach ball

I bring this image back into the program and attach it to the sphere as a material set on image/flat- this can be brought into the material tab or in the node screen under the material node- the end result for this sphere rendered in cycles  can look like below:

To make the ball really stand out in the scene requires a background that will accentuate the animation and help define the form- this was created with a plane adding a glossy material finish

below are the material node set up for the ball and the floor- they can be seen in the node editor window: The ball material is made from a diffuse shade material with a color node based of an image. The floor node is a diffused glossy shader called Beckmann that has a blue color.

well that's it for the objects and stage- we will look at the camera set up and controls for the ball object.

ciao