Assignment 2: ball bounce

Here is a bouncing tennis ball animation created with Maya and After Affects (instructions on how to texture the ball are not included. I just textured mine to look cool). Here are the steps to replicating the animation:

First, open Maya. Create a ball by clicking the NURBS Sphere button on the shelf under Surfaces (make sure Interactive Creation is off).

With the ball selected, type 10 in for Translate Y in the Channel Box. Then set the keyframe (press S on the keyboard).

Go to frame 10 and set the Translate Y value to 0. press S.

Go to frame 18 and change the Translate Y value to 8. press S.

Repeat this process for each time the ball does a full bounce by decreasing the Translate Y value and the number of frames by 3/4 of the previous value. For example, if it took 8 frames for the ball to bounce up and back down, then the next bounce would take 6 frames to bounce back up down.

When finished, go to Window -> Animation Editors -> Graph Editor. This step requires quite a bit of mouse work, but it's important if you want the bounces to look realistic. Adjust the curves for Translate Y so the ball moves faster as it reaches the floor and slower as it reaches its peak.

Under the Display Render Settings, set the image format to PNG and make sure the Frame Range includes the whole animation. Go to Render -> Batch Render.

When Rendering is complete open After Affects. Press command I to import your images. Select the first PNG file and make sure PNG Sequence is checked. Press Enter. Click and drag the batch of images to the New Composition button. Press command M to put the images in the Render Que. Click on Lossless next to Output Module and click on Format Options. Set the Video Codec to MPEG-4 Video. Press Enter twice to confirm and then press the Render button. This concludes all the steps for making a bouncing ball.