Maya Demo - Bouncing Ball - Basketball Weight

All right, so just quick, if you go into Animation Buffet, I'll put that link in the post, you can go all the way down and you have a bunch of ball, ball, bob, ball, character, everything, a bunch of rigs in there, most of them are free. If you want to go into something a bit more specific with squash and stretch, like this one's really good, actually the one with all the texture changes really good, this guy works really well, this one, I mean it's all pretty good if you want to go that way, but for now you don't have to. So within Maya, what I usually do is I set it up like this, where I have my outliner here, underneath this one there, it's mainly because of the workflow at work basically, actually it's not, I mean you can do whatever you want here in terms of camera, you can do a create camera or do this type of camera and then you can rename this into shot cam, just in case you don't want to use, you know, whatever camera you have. That's basically my setup, I have the graph edit in here and then the perspective mode in here. Now for a bouncing ball, I would recommend an orthographic one, so for those who haven't used Maya, so if you're doing a bouncing ball for the first time, I would do a create polygon cube and that is going to be your ground plane, because a plane from an orthographic view, you're not going to see the line. And if you've never used Maya, then it's the, this W is for translate, E is for rotate and R is for scale, in case you want to change things. So to me, I would scale this up more like this, you can go like this, but then you're gonna have to make it pretty flat and again you can go to panel orthographic side, that's the view. So you can see here that you will see what's going on here, compared to if I do create poly plane and you put this low here, you can see that if I do this and deselect it, you can't see it. Obviously it's here in the scene, but in orthographic view you can't see it and that's why I take it out. So for me, this is going to be my reference ground plane for the ball. So again, shot canvases, if you do your pantomime or lip sync, that's how I would do something, I wouldn't do a new camera like this, I would go the create camera. So for the bouncing ball, you don't need it. It's also simply, probably don't need to rename it, but I'm just going to call it ground and I'm going to use a create poly sphere and that's going to be my bouncing ball here. I'm just going to rename it ball and that's all I need. Again, you can look around here if you want to, but basically I want to have that ball bounce like this and come to a stop and I'm going to make this just a bit longer and then that's that. And in terms of frame length, it's usually around 120, you want to give yourself some time, 130 frames and that should be around it and you can, if you play this, it's gonna be... roll, stop. Yeah, like around that time. The way to make this easier, I would just concentrate on the ball going up and down and then we add the translate over. So what you can do is, I want to start maybe at this height and then in Maya you can hit s to key everything, so for me I have it as a hotkey to shift S, you can see on the right how this happened here. You can also just create a separate key and whatever you want to do for instance just in this you do a right click and key select it. Again I have this on a hotkey so I can just do that just to keep things simple. But at the very beginning you can just key everything if you want. So I'm going to go in frame one, select the ball, key everything and then you can start to time things out if you want to. I just set keys and I bring this down to this and if you look at the numbers it gets a bit complicated because you already have some some weird translates and stuff like that in there. So what I would do I would take that ball translate zero so you know that is when it's at the bottom and then you take your take this here zoom in you can take your ground plane and then move it up and in that way you know that whenever the ball is on the ground at least here it's a zero. It's gonna be much easier to key multiple spots there. So if that's the beginning here what I'm going to do is I'm going to key this here and it's going to be up in the air. In the lower left you can see I'm going to set a key here put this guy back because he has already keys on there so that's zero and then he might go up in the air and then back to zero and then up in the air and back to zero so that's what I would do in terms of setting the keys. Now again for those who've never used Maya if I set a key here okay that's my starting position and it falls down maybe on frame 13 it's going to be at zero and then it's going to bounce up in the air again not as high and now I want to go back to zero either you type in zero here or you take this key middle mouse drag over and then set a key again and then you can see in your hold on I gotta deselect my channel you can see how it's going to copy that key so again I can go over it might be up in the air go back down middle mouse drag this one over set key and I copies that so same thing if I would be up in the air middle mouse drag over and set a key again it copies that key that you have here again I don't want to do that so here it's going to bounce a bit less and then back to zero and so on and you can see that this this is ty because you translate y this is basically representing the the bounciness of your ball so if I take a drawing tool let's say here it would be that type of path the arcs of the ball is basically what your ty is going to be so if I take this drawing tool off what you're going to do now is you're going to change the tangents so again for you have never used Maya these guys are tangents you move these around and it's going to move the curves around now what you got to do is you have to think in terms of timing and what that means for the ball right if you play this right now it's just going to bounce but it's in the middle and it's not going to be very convincing in terms of the timing so what you need to do is when something drops it's going to be slow and it's going to accelerate as it goes down so I'm going to hit this and then this one will flatten the tangent you can see it's flat now and now it's going to accelerate a little bit what you can see here and that's the big key for for bouncing balls you can see that that curve starts to flatten again you don't want to do that you want in your spacing the ball let's go back to my tool I can if that's the spacing it's going to get bigger and bigger as it drops just in terms of of anything that you want to accelerate a ball any type of movement right so the easiest way to do this I mean they're different ways some people uh with this here they break the tangent so now I can move that tangent separately and won't affect the right one and what they do is they use weighted tangents and then they scale it all the way in I'm not a fan of weighted tangents at all it's a huge pain to work with especially when you take over a shot from someone else so what I do is I always break the tangents so I do it like this and then basically what you want to do is every time it's at the top right you're looking like this you're going to flatten the tangents and here I'm going to break the tangents and here I'm going to break the tangents and then that's that this needs more corrections obviously this has I don't think has enough bounces but you want that tangent to be at the curve even slightly this way you don't want it below that green line because then you're going to have an ease in right so you're going to have this up here this is going to be up here this is going to be slightly up here again I can tell it doesn't have enough bounces but I'm going to leave it at that for now and you can zoom in a little bit you can see what's going on now even if with that change if you look at your bouncing ball it's better than before but it's not great so if I feel like well this probably needs a few more bounces and it gets a bit slow towards the end what happens is that every time every time your ball is bouncing and hitting the ground it's going to lose energy and it's going to bounce less high but also it's going to take less long so if I go 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 frames for bouncing the first bounce 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 it's going to be shorter and shorter you might say maybe that's not too bad for the first bounce but then after that there's a good chance that this needs to be shorter so I'm going to move all those keys move that a bit in so it's definitely getting shorter and I can go in here and you can see that I have in my graph editor I have more keys than I need to have right now it's confusing why I suddenly have three keys here suppose I have everything keyed so I'm just gonna you can delete or cut but I'm just gonna and I'm so used to cutting I'll just leave it at that so I just have this here I probably want another bounce maybe after two keys two keys again you can take this bring it up a bit higher I'm gonna flatten that and you gotta break those tangents and break this one this one is already broken yeah and every time you do make any changes you have to kind of reassess how your tangents are it's kind of okay it's not great but I think it's going to feel better this feels a bit off in terms of time definitely going to make this a bit shorter and you can see that doesn't look right so it needs to be again that tangent can't be below that green line otherwise it's going to ease in if you look at this your bouncing ball let's go back not too bad at the end too fast I'm going to take a key here and make that just a bit longer not too bad I can probably do one more bounce so let's say two frames set a key two frames set a key and then this won't be really minimal so flat break the tangent which I already have and as always let's break the tangent here just in case I need to add another bounce so now you have the basic bouncing ball it's kind of okay again I'm not worried or textures for rotations so what are you going to do now I want this to travel left or right so the blue one here if you select this here this is my travel key so that's your translate z I'm going to set a key here and at the end of the ball imagine it travels left or right it's going to go roll stop maybe around here I'm guessing when I set a key or you can just move it it's going to set a key for you that is that now if you do this it's going to travel very evenly and come to some stop right there because that is a very linear key so what you want to do is you want to flatten that last one so it comes to a slow stop like this you don't want to ease into this you're going to bring that down and you can bring it down like this it's going to accelerate and slowly stop now if you watch this it's not going to enough it's moving it's actually not that bad I was gonna say you might have to set a key here move this a bit over spline it and adjust it like that so that there's enough long time you can go like this and really give just a very slow ease in but I think right now for me it takes too long to it's gonna bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce to me at this point it should probably already stop and if you want to be extra picky your ball can come to a stop roll back a bit and overshoot a bit and then come to another stop meaning that at that point here it might back a little bit so that does here it's gonna go a little bit over flatten this tangent that's that's a lot it seems like it's gonna roll back a lot right let's zoom in here what is that stop doing roll yeah it's good that stop it stops too quickly and it rolls back too much I don't mind how much it rolls back let's see yeah it's a bit much so it should take longer to come to a stop but not roll back as much I'm gonna bring this down and if I look at this key in my more like this now if I look at the ball where's the ball there you go not too bad let's full screen this so that's a comfortable amount of time where the ball is gonna come to a stop it still feels like it's rolling a bit long take these keys bring it back a little bit it's a little bit long but it's fairly comfortable now if you look at the bounces it works it's a bit standard you can go into I need to go into uh animation so if you've never used Maya here you have the different it changes all the tools up here if I go into animation you can go then visualize and then you can say uh where is this here create edible motion trail now you can see what those bounces are doing bounce bounce bounce I can see with this that this takes longer than this so I'm gonna take this key bring it back so you can see visually how this is changing right then you have this bounce and this feels just a bit off with that I'm gonna take this bring it down and after that it's kind of okay it's basically you want for instance one two three four five frames until the top one two three four five until the end it's usually it's safe to bring this to the same length so one two three four five six seven one two three four five six seven and that's pretty okay now as you move things around again you do want to check in your ty how that is affecting the curves it's not too bad I don't see anything where the tangent is below the line but again it's it's a bit it's a bit boring in terms of how the bounces work so if you watch this again let's go up here bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce and that's that but you can exaggerate the drop where the hang time so when it's up here it's a bit longer and then it drops a bit faster up a bit faster hangs here a bit longer and you can do this again multiple ways so if you have let's say this I got the first two again you can take this tangent and you can give it weight and then you can pull out those tangents gonna change all this I'm not a fan of that I just like more control on my own so I can go here set a key bring it up a bit and then adjust the hang time like this so same thing if we've got the apex let's say two frames and then two frames forward just to make it symmetrical I don't really mind too much about a huge amount of contrast you're gonna give this longer hang time and I'm gonna have a bit more the sharper drop so that this tangent is not exactly overlapping with that green line it's going to be slightly above whenever you do that you're gonna have to start adjusting a few things in terms of the height if I do this mindlessly for both again I'm going to zoom in a little bit I'm going to spline this whole thing this one and make sure that this one's flat this one is a bit more like this and adjust that it's kind of okay you can see how it feels like it's going to be okay but then it kind of travels too much again you're gonna have to go back in there and start adjusting so that your tangents are not like this going in or like that you want to be nicely curved and that's usually just for a bouncing ball it's you're not going to have that type of fine tuning in terms of symmetry when it's a character doing something very specific you want a bit more contrast in your in your timing so I'm going to keep it like that again this feels a bit weird I'm going to bring this up a little bit no idea what this is going to look like I'm guessing it's going to be okay I'm going to bring this up maybe this a bit here and maybe a bit more like that let's watch this let's take the graph out and this is under motion drop so if I play this now see that feels already different so that hang time is longer here and it suddenly drops to this do I need more bounces feels okay that's not too bad that to me is your standard and I can have grid is grayed out that is on my Maya does this you have to grid on off here as well kind of see a bit more of the distance so again you can exaggerate this where I grab this and I want to make the hang time really long I can grab this out here and it's going to suddenly drop or make that really extreme and bring this up so this is going to be you can see how long it holds to a point where it almost almost travels too long in a straight line where you almost have to start adjusting this a little bit to some degree right so if I do this and I do a longer one here again I can bring this out one frame bring this out one frame whoops one frame and then I look at this does that flatten too much maybe then it comes to a point where it comes down to your sense of timing like how how does it feel for you because there's only so much you can do in terms of all right well let's set more keys put some asymmetry there blah blah blah like as an animator you really have to go by feel as well so I'm gonna add a bit more hang time here bring this up and this feels like really long this doesn't look right to me already well let's play it anyway full screen it's not too bad you can probably at this point also accelerate uh exaggerate the last ones all right if I'm here and you want this you can also say all right well let's exaggerate maybe go a bit higher to flatten not too much just this definitely a bit more here a bit more here leave the last ones and let's see how this feels you so you can hopefully you see this that the hang time is longer like how long does it stay in the air and the drop is going to be fast and you can see also the timing here and the spacing how the ball starts to accelerate towards the end it's not massively accelerating towards the end where it doesn't feel like a like there's a almost like a pop so if I would go even more right let's exaggerate more do this maybe like that really bring this up here I bring this up like that it might even go like this maybe just just hang time and really bring this to something that's more like that you're going to start having almost and that starts to feel too fast the first two especially that last one it just gets too fast on the drop so you have to be careful in terms of timing here that this doesn't immediately drop like that so again to me I would I would reduce this in here reduce it like that it's all because of this here and again you can bring this back a little bit this back a bit just this a bit so it's not so crazy and that is that for a medium bouncing ball I would give this again enough time to roll still feel this is probably too long to roll and stop that's not too bad without rotations now just for those who do want to do uh squash and stretch again you don't have to do for this assignment this is just in theory right so if I bring back a motion trail and I would do this with a rig that has the squash and stretch controls but just for now if you have your ball and you have to select your scale set a key here it gets into very frame by frame in terms of what you're going to do with those scale keys but imagine this is your squash and you can't just scale out like this because then it's too big if you scale out you have to scale it a bit smaller and then you have to bring this down because it can't hover and it starts to change your ty when you start adding more keys like that and even in terms of translate so be very careful once you are going to start adding squash and stretch so if do if you just do this and this is what I'm showing it to you this is wrong because it points down but it's pointing it should be pointing towards where you're going that's where the motion trail is actually helpful that you have a little bit of that in there and see you have to key those rotates oh my rotates are not key there you go so I gotta rotate set a key rotate more like that set a key set a key and it's okay when you go up same thing here I want to set a bunch of keys and that's when you start setting keys on rotations and translates not every frame depends what you want to do with it but I want to go up here again you can't just scale like this you're gonna have to point that ball towards where it's going it's going to stay on that path a bit more and then it's going to be okay if you want to go extreme it can go all the way up and on the up it might even squash like this like that can sometimes happen but again you're gonna have to start looking at where is it pointing and then you start having a few more keys like that and then it might even go like that and you want your scale to be back to normal so one here one here and so on into the drop so if you watch this without the what did I do here motion trail you can see the difference here between a squash and stretch and a no ball and you also have to look at like how this feels right as it goes down it starts to stretch this might be already a bit much here stretch and you can see how this feels how suddenly a ball has a slight change and then a squash here and so on just it gets very interesting in terms of of feeling here to me I will probably rotate this guy already a bit more into this and start almost leaning the the character the ball bit backwards it gets kind of cute sometimes you can really go frame by frame and say okay well I want to have a feeling of this right before the end then squash and then out like this and even that maybe here maybe a bit higher and then you can see how that feels it gets very weird because you're starting to ease in right without a key here and then down here and then this this just doesn't feel right so be careful when you start adding more keys like this it just starts to really mess things up and that's the main thing about your bouncing ball I wouldn't go too crazy with too many keys I will keep it fairly simple and then adjust the tangents more in terms of timing right to change things up give this break it down in here give this a bit more timing like that adjust it more like this versus setting too many keys especially when it comes to moving over and what I see in some of the the bouncing balls in your in your reel is when you have the ball bouncing and suddenly like accelerate forward like this and then it goes down and then suddenly accelerate again then you have something like this too many keys and then especially something like this where it just pops and goes down that's over complicating things so translate when it moves left to right should be really simple you're up and down should be really simple it's very flat here but again in terms of the look and how it feels it gets a bit more complicated once you do the squash and stretch but that's also going to look different if you use a rig that has control that makes sense so that is the bouncing ball medium weight a couple bounces enough time to roll roll back a bit and stop and again I wouldn't do a squash and stretch just yet so just concentrate on the ball I can take the scale and then delete it now if I change any type of timing it might look weird because now suddenly I changed the timing but I took out the squash and stretch it still kind of works a bit poppy but I'm gonna leave it at that before I confuse you all too much hope that makes sense and I'm gonna do one for the bowling ball which is a lot simpler and then the beach ball which just takes a lot longer and that's it questions let me know you can just reply to the module post there and I'm happy to explain more all right thank you