Bowling ball V9

Medium closeup




Closeup



I think this is the version I'm most satisfied with thus far. I lengthened the roll of the ball and tweaked the curves so that the speed was relatively consistent when coming out of the last bounce, and had it slow to a stop. The rotation was a little tricky to get right, and I'm still not sure it looks correct. I opted to have it roll for about one frame after it came to a stop, just very slightly, in the hopes that it would be a little more realistic. In reality the ball wouldn't stop moving at the exact point it stopped rotating... I think?

However, looking at the closeup shot, you can see a huge problem - it goes off-screen! It shouldn't be too difficult to fix (hopefully) - I should be able to use the fcurve editor. If I select all the x position keyframes and just drag them up/down to slightly alter the position, I should be able to re-frame it and bring it back into the centre.

Bowling ball V8

Version 8



I've done my absolute best with this. I've tweaked the arc, the timing — made it longer, shorter, higher, further, lower, shorter, every conceivable combination, and this is the one that looked the best. I don't think it's too horrendous — far from perfect, far from logical, but it's at a point that I'm relatively satisfied. Mostly.

The only remaining issues, for me, are with the rolling at the end. I think it could stand to roll a little further, and slow to a more gradual stop. It's a bit abrupt at the moment I think. So any further amendments will, for the time being, just be some final tweaks to the rotation and movement.

Bowling ball V7

Several slight variations on this one; trying to see which timing works better!
Version 7.1



First, general changes. As stated previously I've slightly altered the arc of the bounce. I think it's looking a lot better now! I also kept the ball stuck to the ground for just one frame before it bounces back up again. I had to alter the last (tiny) bounce in order to stop it looking too jerky - I had to increase the height of the ball very slightly and allow it enough time to come back down so that it wouldn't look like a weird juddery glitch, whilst still being quick enough to give the impression that it's barely more than a vibration. I don't know if I succeeded...!

The first thing I noticed was that the bounce itself was still slightly bothering me. With the new arc, it seemed even less weighty than before. It seemed to move too smoothly through the arc - it was a little too uniform. So I tried to increase the spacing between the impact with the ground and the first frame of the bounce, hoping that if it was a little faster it would appear to have struck the floor with more force.


Version 7.2



With the new timing, I think the ball certainly "feels" heavier as it bounces off the floor, but the drop from the bounce seems too slow. I think maybe I got it backwards and should use the timing for the climb for the drop, and revert the climb back to its original speed? I decided to try doing the same thing for the drop's timing as well.

Version 7.3



As I suspected, though, it made the whole thing too choppy. The ball is hardly in the air at all and it really needs to "hover" there for just a second as it fights against gravity.

I think I'll try reversing what I did for 7.2 - having the ascension of the bounce at the slower speed and the decline faster and see how it looks...

Bowling ball V6

Version 6

Side



Medium closeup



I slightly altered the bounce so that there was a little more delay between the peak and the drop. I think having a slightly "choppier" drop works well for stationary balls, but when you start to introduce motion and arcs it looks a bit weird - you can't have the ball suddenly clip to the floor whilst maintaining the slow and steady forward motion.

I think it's looking alright, but I'm not too happy with it. I don't think it really moves enough in an arc, especially on the first bounce - it seems to hit an invisible wall then suddenly drop down. That's possibly why it looks so odd on the medium closeup view? I need to smooth that out and perhaps increase its forward movement just a tad.

It's only noticeable on the side view, but the ball's initial drop is once again bothering me. I think it starts too quickly - I need to ease it out of that forward shove before it drops.

Going back to one of my reference videos, I also noticed something about the second bounce:

You can't really notice it without going frame by frame, but the ball actually remains on the ground for an extra frame before it bounces back up into its last, tiny jump. I'll need to look at incorporating this into my own animation I think, see how it looks.

Bowling ball V5

Version 5

Side



Medium close-up



I know, I said I was going to try spacing out the bounce... but I just ended up getting confused. The speed of the bounce was bothering me - my keyframes were all over the place, and after spending the better part of 45 minutes trying to tweak what I already had, I just ended up saying 'screw it' and doing the entire thing from scratch.

I still don't know. I think the speed is looking a little better - but again, the bounce - I think it's just a little too choppy. I think it needs to ease very slightly into the peak of the bounce and then hold it for just a fraction of a second. The only danger with that is then it might look too slow?!

I seem to be having a lot of difficulty expressing any form of weight with this. Or is it just me?

Bowling ball drop V3 & V4

Hooray for Vimeo processing!

Version 3

Here, I've adjusted the timing very slightly so that the ball doesn't take so long to ease into the drop. As a result, the ball enters the frame much earlier. I think this speed's better, but I'm not sure about the bounces. They seem too... "floaty" to me. I can't put my finger on what it is, exactly. I think that the ball drops from the peak of its first bounce a bit too slowly and doesn't seem to have much impact with the ground. It's a heavy object - the drop should probably be quite snappy or choppy to really give it the feeling of weight.

Version 4

I wondered if spacing the ball out would help me to figure out why the bounces look a bit weird. I think they look a little better now; still slightly floaty? I'm not sure if trying to add the roll at this stage was a bad idea - it's easy to get distracted by too much going on. In this case though I think it might help - makes anything that looks off stick out a lot more.

Anyway. I don't think the ball really rolls or moves far enough. If it's going to roll, I think it probably needs to roll properly - if it was dropped straight down it probably wouldn't roll at all, like in the reference video - so it's probably only going to look right if I animate it rolling as if it's been dropped with a bit of a push. If that makes sense.

I think I could make this version work if I were to add just a little more rotation to the ball, but I might experiment with making the bounces and rolling a little more prominent, as if the ball has been dropped with some forward force.

Bowling ball drop V1, V2

I hate Vimeo! It's hard to review these things properly when it takes so long to process... so here's a bulk post containing the first three revisions of the bowling ball drop!

Version 1

First one using the timing and spacing on the graph almost to a T (save for some minus spacing differences). Approximately 13 frames to drop, then 4 frames to bounce and fall again. It looks alright, but it's far too slow. That can be rectified very easily with some simple keyframe adjustments.


Version 2

In the second version, I attempted to alter the speed of the initial drop. The bounce speed remains relatively unchanged. Now that I look at it from this angle it's not as bad as I thought, but the main reason I wasn't happy with this one was the drop speed. The ball was far too slow coming out of its highest point - it hung in the air for a very long time before hitting its max speed. Of course, in the render output, you won't see the ball begin to fall at all - you'll only see it enter the frame at high speed. So that might actually be more effective - I may come back to this version's timing, but I tried a third amendment just to see whether it would be any better. Vimeo is processing it currently, so... see you in half an hour.

My current concern with this is how simple it is. I know it's not the point to make it overly complex, but I can't help but feel it might look a bit "lazy" if it's just a straight up-and-down movement. I'm seriously considering trying to get the ball to roll across the ground. I think I'll attempt it anyway, just to see how it looks, but there's no reason I have to use it in the final render if I can't get it right (but that would be giving up...)

Bowling ball planning

Tremble before the might of my amazing graph:

Apologies for the shoddiness; I don't have Photoshop on this computer so MS Paint is the absolute best I could do!

I basically very roughly traced the outline of the falling bowling ball to get an idea of the speed/timing of the drop. As you can see it's a very steady rate of acceleration; obviously it's a very literal trace, so I don't know how well it will convert to animation. I can always tweak it a bit and remove frames if need be.

The blue and green balls on the left show the motion of the ball's first bounce. It doesn't go very high - the climb (blue) has a big gap and then they're very cluttered together near the top (seems to hover for a couple of frames). In contrast, the decline (green) is very evenly spaced. There's another, miniscule bounce after that one (hardly moves at all) but I wasn't willing to waste much more time tracing that one...!

It's pretty rough but... hopefully it'll give me a starting point.

It took me far, far longer to do that than I'd hoped. I hate this computer.

Bowling ball drop footage

Getting hold of and dropping a bowling ball myself isn't really too practical, so I've been poking around online. Fortunately it's a fairly basic exercise in animation so there's plenty of pretty clear reference footage to use!

It's quite interesting to note how the ball rolls after being dropped in one video, but not in the other. I'm guessing it's because in the first video the ball is given more of a push forward as it's being dropped, whereas in the second it's simply released with his fingers and so drops straight down.

It's a bit difficult to determine the height from which it's dropped, but I wouldn't think it's much more than a metre. The ball hits the floor quite quickly but doesn't seem to accelerate as fast as the tennis ball - it actually seems to have quite a steady rate of motion. It hits the ground after about 10 frames - the same as the tennis ball - and bounces just once or twice (the second bounce is tiny, the ball barely leaves the floor) before rolling away.

I'll probably do a couple of different versions - one without the roll, and one with the roll, to see what looks best.