Hi community, I am trying to make a short bouncing ball animation to learn blender basics and the principles of animation. Hoping this thread would help someone who wants to get a radical understanding of animation, in the end.
For a start, I have set up a ball which is easy to “Squash and Stretch” and “Rotate” concurrently.
Roughly summarized,
Place a UV Sphere, a Lattice and a Armature (and G+Z+1).
Make a Lattice parent (Lattice Deform) of a Sphere.
Add 2 constraints on a Lattice.
Stretch To: Armature: Bone
Copy Location: Armature: Bone
Then it squashes and stretches on the origin.
I hope it works reasonably but please give me your advice if you know better setup.
I just notice that using 3 armatures would be simple and better. I didn’t know I can rotate a ball independently. Anyway, I have learned some about armature and constraints.
In this test, all IPO curves are manually edited on every single flame. So, next I will try to use Advanced Stride Support and clean up messy curves before things go too far.
For a more realistic look you could make your ball a softbody. It’s really fast and easy once you figure it out.
Add a Icosphere, and set the subdivition to one.
Give your sphere a subsurf modifier.
Add a Plane, scale it up a bit, go to the phisics section, and under Force fields and deflection, turn on deflection and leave the settings as the are.
Select your sphere and raise it to a good height above your plane, then go to the Softbody section and turn on softbodies. Turn off goal, and set Rgidity to 1.
Hold down the right arow and watch your soft body bounce.
You can render it like this, or you can bake it. Bakeing is pretty easy to figure out, just make sure that you set Interval to 1.
Thank you for your comment TV. I think the video codec was not good choice. Use other one next time.
And Softbody would be nice. Really appreciate your detailed instruction. I will try to use it on some shots. But, so far as this early stage, my focus of this ball exercise is on the principals of animation. Therefor I plan to animate the balls by hand for the most part.
So, I just updated my ball rig. Looks better, doesn’t it?
Feature:
Squash/Stretch handle on the top and the bottom- Bump/Grind handle- G/R/S handle
I have tried to implement Rolling control but all I could have done was 4-way-roll. Useless. I gave it up.
and must say: Awesome I mean, it is simple, very easy to use and even
I get small animations done in no time gg
But what I still wonder, what others wondered in this thread before, and what
I am wondering if I use or see others rigs: How do I get bones/armatures look
the why I like them too?
For example facial expressions in the man-candy-rig, or the stretch, roll and so on
bones of your rig? I still don’t understand how to make it that way, though I got
some things done in animating existing rigs already
I downloaded this rig, haven’t checked it in detail yet, but you seem to have some cyclic issues. Try moving the master bone and canceling the move. The ball jump to a random place. Nice idea though…
really don’t understand where the weird shapes came from 
