- Creation of the Ball Maze
I began first with creating the maze, envisioning the animation I wanted and the way each material would interact with the ball. I realized quickly that I should create a storyboard and drew one out, breaking the animation into four segments.
Storyboard
While sketching my storyboard, I traced over a PNG of my maze setup to give myself an accurate sense of spacing. As I did so I became aware that some objects needed to move down or up, etc, in order for my intended animation to work. So, after completing my storyboard, I went back into Maya and finished creating the scene, re-spacing, and tweaking color and translucency on both the funnel and “trampoline” to allow my animation within the objects to be displayed. I also added a material to the ball once again to view my rotation more easily.
Ball Maze Setup
Time to get rolling!
- First Segment- Day One
Animation 1 was the easiest, as I was expecting. It helped me feel out the space I’d created and the physical characteristics of my little basketball. In this first segment, the ball simply slides down the ramp and whams into the wall on the right.
I spent some time adding a very small squash/stretch bounce as it reaches the bottom of the ramp, giving it a little momentum from its downhill roll.
The curve I spent the most time on was definitely the Translate-Y curve, as I debated back and forth how noticeable I wanted that little bounce to be. A longstanding goal of mine is to be better at animating from the graph editor and having to rely less on key frames.
As the ball smacks into the wall, you can see that I’ve added a small pause there for the full effect of this exaggerated squash. The next segment will be almost entirely squashes as the ball ricochets off the lower level walls, and this pause creates anticipation.
- Second Segment- Day One
This one would be more complicated, and I knew it would require a lot of patience and attention to detail in regards to my squash and stretch as well as timing.
Before anything else, I keyed the Y-Translations, using my storyboard as a guide.
Much timing as well as squashing work will go into this, not to mention the exaggerated stretch of my “trampoline” that will be added in to anticipate launching the ball out in segment 3. Most importantly, though, I needed to make sure that the actual points of contact look convincing and accurately represent the laws of physics- the worst scenario would be to do all that work on each “pose” and then realize the trajectory looks off.
The biggest difficulty I faced when I got started was attempting to make the impacts look realistic. I started off like this, which looked completely incorrect:
But realized quickly after taking a second to think analytically that both impacts must be linear at their peaks. I rewatched the lecture from the ball bounce exercise- we made those points along the ground linear because due to gravity/momentum the ball must come right down and right back up- otherwise it will appear that the ball is floating or being pulled along. The part of the curve that can be changed can only be during the ball’s trajectory.
I changed both curves to linear, but the effect confused me….
Despite my changes, the ball still appeared to be sailing along in the air, and barely hitting the “ceiling” at all. Experimentally, I attempted to replicate the curve I had on the first bounce (from the wall to the floor), as that one looked more realistic:
This time, the ball certainly popped up noticeably, but it was clipping through the ceiling and pausing oddly.
Once again I sat and thought for a long while, breaking down the issue rather than just putting a lot of work into random guesses. I came to the conclusion that the entire arc of this bounce must be linear, and in fact it has to happen a lot sooner. The ball moves almost straight upwards, with great momentum from its fall, and travels a much shorter distance than it did on the first bounce. Therefore it must happen a lot faster, with no time for a lazy, bouncy trajectory. Both the second impact and its journey into the “trampoline” are affected by this and must be mostly linear to convey the ball’s weight and the speed it has gathered.
I moved the keyframes up and adjusted the graph accordingly.
Voila, the completion of Segment 2. I allowed the ball to slow a little at the point where it is caught by the trampoline.
- Third Segment- Day One
I had intended to leave Segment 3 for another day, as I knew how exhausting Segment 2 would be (it was), but I was so excited to do this short and exaggerated, cartoonish little clip that I decided to plunge into it for fun.
This segment is my favorite part of the ball maze. In this clip, I’m using the secondary action of the “trampoline” to give an emphasis to my basketball’s weight and momentum. I also get to use some overlapping action here as the trampoline snaps back into its original position after the ball has already left its net, not only reminding us of the ball’s weight but giving an idea of the material and weight of the trampoline, too.
V. Final Segment/Finishing Touches- Day Two
This segment proved to be more challenging but not overly so.
Continuing my personal challenge to use as little key frames as possible and animate from the graph editor, I discovered that I could key only the back-and-forth translation and simply exaggerate the slope in between, in order to cause the ball to appear to be travelling around the curves of the funnel rather than across it. I felt very triumphant in this discovery.
However, as I excitedly showed this to my partner, he pointed out that due to the ball’s momentum, it would not immediately begin spiraling and instead would smack back and forth on the first couple bounces before beginning the spiral. I watched it many times and decided he was right. I sadly deleted my first arc on the graph editor to create this more realistic animation:
And so I decided I was done. I had a lot of fun with this little project, challenged myself, and came out a better animator for it!
Final Product: