Animating a Bouncing Ball in Maya

From animating the spaceship, I realised that I needed to learn how to better animate in Maya. Therefore I decided to animate a bouncing tennis ball. First, I created a plane to act as the floor and then a sphere to act as the ball. I reinforced some of the skills I had learnt from sculpting the Earth by creating a groove in the ball. This made it look more like a tennis ball.

Second, I dug out my old physics textbook and modelled the ball using SUVAT equations - this allowed me to find the exact time and height of the first seven maxima, which I inputted directly to Maya as the key frames for the ball's Y translations.

This sped up the process immensely and resulted in a more accurate animation. However, the first result was strange:

Maya had smoothed the acceleration between the key frames, resulting in the ball decelerating before it hits the floor and accelerating after it rebounds.

To fix this, I had to learn how to use the Graph Editor. I found this to be pretty intuitive and was able to fix the animation in about ten minutes.

I was happier with this animation but it still didn't seem quite right, so I animated the ball being spun by each bounce.

I think this drastically increased the believability of the animation. Nevertheless, I still wasn't satisfied. I textured the ball and the floor and added a spotlight directly above the ball, in the hopes that it would create an expanding and contracting shadow as the ball bounced.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to set up the renderer yet and as a result couldn't achieve the shadow effect that I wanted. I was still proud of my animation though.

As an afterthought, I decided to create a simulation of a bouncing ball. I wanted to do this so I could practice using the nCloth tools, which I had built my flag with. I also wanted to see how accurate my animation was compared to a simulation. Unfortunately, after I set everything up, my computer refused to render the animation after the point at which the ball initially hits the floor. I double checked to make sure I had modelled everything correctly but couldn't find a problem.

A ball bouncing is a relatively simple animation, but it allowed me to explore and understand the different tools for animation in Maya. I now feel much more confident with using the graph editor. I also discovered some of the different lights and that are available in Maya.