hi,
I wanted to create a bouncing ball animation for practice on basic animation, but I was wondering how you’d approuch it. Since the ball should keep the same volume at all times, I thought the best thing to do is using armatures, in a squareshape. But I can’t find an autoweight feature that would create the weighting for this (the farther away the vertex is from the bone, the less weight influence).
How would you create it, while keeping in mind the ball must have the same volume at all times?
no spectator will ever notice if the volume stays exactly the same. simply add one bone which starts in the middle of the ball and edit the weight manually. go into edit mode, select all vertices, set weight to 1 and clik assign.
for animation, make sure the bone is oriented always along the path - this will make it easy to squash and stretch it.
When I created a bouncing ball animation in Houdini, I just used scaling of the object and adjusted it by eye. I didn’t worry that the volume might not be identical throughout. I’ll try and dig up the result to show. There are two balls, one is more “real”, no dynamics on it though, all hand keyframing…
