We’ll start things off with the classic first animation assignment: animating a bouncing ball. This introduces the fundamental concepts of timing, tangents, keyframes and the core animation principle “squash and stretch”. Chapter 3 in “3D Animation with Maya 7” provides a detailed tutorial that you can follow when working on this assignment.
Your task is to make one animation showing two different bouncing balls chosen from the following list: rubber ball, ping pong ball, bowling ball or water balloon. You can use a NURBS sphere for each ball. Add a material to the sphere to give it an appropriate appearance. In the final animation, start by dropping each ball from the same height at the same time. Each ball should bounce an appropriate number of times for the material it is made of before coming to rest. The balls should have horizontal and vertical movement (i.e. do not simply bounce them in place). Make sure you include the following features:
- space the keyframes appropriately
- adjust the tangent timing
- apply squash and stretch (You can do this by simply animating the scale, or you can use a lattice deformer.)
It should be easy to tell from the animation which material each ball is made of.
Specific grading criteria:
- Sense of weight
- Quality of the timing of the motion, including placement of keys and adjustment of tangents
- Effective use of squash and stretch
- Overall quality and appeal of piece
What to submit:
- rendered movie of the final animation
- your complete Maya project folder
- readme file
The basic submission procedure is the same as for all assignments.
- You will be submitting your entire Maya project folder. All additional files (e.g. the readme.txt and image files) should be in the root of that folder.
- N.B. Name your project folder as “A1YourName”, where “YourName” is your first and last name. This is how we will identify your submission.
- Include a brief readme file that identifies how you have met each of the requirements. You can also include any problems you could not resolve or particular features you would like us to notice. The file should be called “readme.txt” and included in the main project directory of your Maya files. Include your full name and student number in this file. This file should be brief (< 1 page).
- Be sure to include all the rendered images and movies listed above!
- Submit by following the instructions below. If you need to update the submission, just copy another folder and update your name with v2, v3, etc. We will only mark the last submission.
1. The "classes" folder should be automatically mounted. If it isn't, there should be a link on your desktop that you can double click on to mount the folders. The link is called “tcsserver.ucdavis.edu/Classes”.
2. In the classes folder, open"TCS 131".
3. Drag and drop your assignment into the "Submissions" folder. Make sure
it is named correctly, as described above.