WEEK 1 - Timing and Spacing

ANIMATING A BALL BOUNCE


For our first project we did a ball bounce exercise in Maya focusing on the first key principles of Animation; Timing and Spacing.

The first thing I did was think about the type of ball I wanted to animate. I also practised what I'd been taught before by testing out timing and spacing on paper.... just drawing it out first. We were taught that there's a key difference between timing and spacing in animation and that it is crucial to get the timing right otherwise your movements will look crude. The way I understand it is that the timing is where the you decide to place your key frames, so if you have a man walking across the screen from left to right, you would just draw the two key frames on either side of the page. The spacing is the frames in-between those key frames and this is where you can get creative...

I have been studying a book called The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams and within it he  states that the timing and spacing will dominate the action of your animation. I have chosen to animate a tennis ball bouncing on a soft carpet... here is my reference video of my ball bounce:

To get a better understanding of the timing and the spacing I had to refer to this footage a lot. I was looking at the time it took for the ball to fall and hit the ground the first time and then bounce back up again. I came to the conclusion that it takes roughly 4 seconds for the ball to stop bouncing. A tennis ball is rather light but it has a nice bounce to it. This is a quick test I made in Maya influenced by what I have learnt here...

You can see that I have considered the timing and the spacing here but I have yet to fully get to grips with Maya's interface. I am finding it very difficult as I have never worked in 3D before and it is a lot of information to remember. There's still a lot of work to put into this ball bounce but I know that I understand Timing and Spacing very throughly now...

SECOND BALL BOUNCE TEST  \/\/\/

Focussing on a slightly bouncier ball for my second test...

Here is the finished version which has much better timing and spacing and I have also flattened the tangents using the Graph editor ...