The last test I did made me really doubt my understanding of the whole bouncing ball idea (timing and spacing), so I took another step backwards and animated a simple loop bounce on 2’s and the contact poses on 1’s.
Next I tried to tackle again the concept of mass and weight in a bounce of a hard surfaced ball. Fingers crossed It looks better then the first attempt. This one is animated on 2’s as well.
Hey Avner,
I’m really liking where you are with these. Distilling way down to the basics. Easy to build up from there when you want.
The first example is working. I still have a few questions regarding how you reach the contact and handle the squash. You may want to experiment with it just a little but swapping a few images around. For instance you have frame 14 (also 47, 80, 113, etc.) with the ball almost at contact and then one frame later (15) is the contact. The spacing between them is minimal. Why not try tossing frame 14 and see what that does? Another experiment might be to swap the squashed and unsquashed versions of the ball at the bottom. Or simply removing the unsquashed version completely and keep everything on 2s.
The second example seems a little soft still. The dissipation is working but the bounces are lacking spark. I think its two frames of contact without squash or stretch. If you are going to switch to 1s on any of this I would experiment with having only one frame of contact. Now that things are a lot more basic its a good time to experiment a little as see what the results are like.
What I think is working so much better in these examples is the dramatic differences in spacing between the top of each bounce and the bottom. Don’t add anything at this point. Keep going, and see if you can reduce this any more.