Chapter 1
This one will never leave us, animators, since day 1 the first thing an animator has to know how to do is the mystical bouncing ball. It is supposed to teach us at least 2 principles of animation: squash and stretch and timing and motion spacing. So, ofcourse, the first exercise we had to do is the bouncing ball. Always fun, so simple yet so important!
I focused on the principle of timing and spacing as I always had trouble with timing, everything is always too slow or too fast. A ball takes 12 frames to touch the floor and as it bounces it will lose strength so we must reduce 2 frames in each bounce until it stops. Then we have to open the graph editor so we can actually mess with its weight and timing, edit the curves (translate X and Y) to make an animation look real.
So as you can see a round curve shows that the ball slows down and the more pronounced angles indicate a faster motion.
Then it’s always good to use the motion trail tool to check if the movement in space is correct and if it looks good.
This is the final result: