Back to school! Pencil 2d Animation: Bouncing Ball

It’s the first week back in school after the end of a 3 week break, (Earned $180 during the holidays, over a period of 31.5 hours ).So note to self, must be a successful game maker and put more effort into IN3D!

 

Today’s post will be about animating a ball, using Pencil 2D a freeware 2D animation software. In today’s lab lesson we had to video ourselves doing a series of activities such as dropping a ball, and observing the action of physics acting on it.We were also thought how to use keyframes to create the illusion of a moving image, much like the old trick of drawing a doodle on pages followed by flipping the pages rapidly.

The Background

This is the base layer, I drew a few curves to mimic the trajectory of dropping ball.Next I drew lines across the trajectory in order to indicate where I should draw the ball for each individual key frame.The space between the lines indicate how fast the ball is moving, the greater the spacing , the greater the velocity of the ball.

Why?This is because our eye has a habit of forming imaginary closure between two white spaces(must be reasonably near) . It’s hard to explain it, but I usually refer to it as a ghosting effect, in my own words of course.

The closer the lines are, the slower the velocity of the ball. Therefore looking at the lines drawn you can infer that, when the ball is dropping down it has a high velocity, but after hitting the ground, energy is transferred. Its return path ,going upwards is at a much lower velocity. This process repeats.

Unfortunately I do not have a wacom YET. But if I had one I would make the ball bouncing effect more realistic by altering the shape of the ball at different points of the animation. For instance at the point where the ball touches the ground, it should have a compressed look, and when it is moving at a high velocity the ball should have a stretched look.