Animation Basics for Beginners - Bouncing Ball 2D & 3D

do you want to start learning animation or maybe you just want to boost your already existing animation skills in that case hello and welcome to this tutorial series which is going along the 51 animation exercises in case you don't know what that is we have a list of 51 great animation exercises on animator island comm if you make your way through all of them you are probably a pretty decent animator at the end in this tutorial series um we're actually gonna do them step by step and while we're doing them I'm gonna teach you everything that I know about the principles and the reasons of why we're doing the things in in this way you might be thinking for the very first exercises that there are kind of basic but I tell you these exercises are the best to really get your animation foundation right even Disney trainees when they come to Disney they have to prove once again that they can do the bouncing ball that they have mastered animation through this very simple exercise at the beginning we're doing everything in 2d and 3d and for the first few to the exercises you don't even need to be able to draw and we're you don't need to invest into any expensive animation software because we are gonna be using completely free and open-source animation software accreta and blender so I hope you are along for the ride first up let's have a look at how the illusion of motion actually works a lot of the times the illusion of motion is explained by a term called persistence of vision but by now scientists are pretty sure that that is not what creates the illusion of motion the persistence of vision says that image is shown in quick succession x' images in quick succession will blend together to one image and this helps us for example to not see pitch black every time when we blink because the image that we were seeing previously is still retained in our eye and here's another nice demonstration of persistence of vision maybe you have seen one of these before if we spend the disk really fast the two sides of the disk should blend together to one image now I'm not sure how well the camera will capture this but let's try it so if it's not persistence of vision what else is there to explain perceived motion there are two more phenomenons one is called the Phi phenomenon and the other one is the beader movement and the beta movement is the one that we are actually looking for in the beta movement we have similar images that are just you know slightly different enough to create context between the images and if these are playing in succession even at a low frame rate we already construct a context between those images for example you can see that it already feels a little bit like there's a teapot traveling from left to right changing colors which is a pretty weird thing if you think about it because in our everyday life we don't see teapots moving on their own or changing colors so scientists by now are pretty sure that this is a cognitive process not a chemical process that happens in our eye the most simple animation that we can do only has two drawings that we can flip back and forth from and it already contains an information that isn't in any of the two drawings alone let me show you what I mean don't worry about following along here I'm gonna explain the software to you later on it just focus on the theory for now I have a timeline with two frames and I already have one ball here and I wanted to travel horizontally to the right now on frame 8 I put another ball in a little bit of a distance down I can activate something called onion skins so I see the previous drawing shining so I can make sure that you know I'm not putting it here I only wanted to move horizontally so yes so I put it here and if we play this back and forth we have a little bit the impression that there is a ball moving left to right now the difference of these two frames on the timeline you know one being here on frame 0 and the other one being here on frame 8 and this distance is called timing but there is another very important kind of distance in this little example animation and that is the distance between the two drawings this distance it's called spacing these are important animation terms and whenever I say an important animation term I try to mark them with a star in this case they're also part of the 12 principles of animation but let me explain your spacing a little more we have an animation with the timing of eight frames but we can we can change the spacing to create the illusion of a different speed let's keep drawing in the same drawings but this time I'm gonna put one the first frame I'm gonna put the ball exactly where it is up here too but in the second frame I'm gonna put it over here so what we have now is two balls moving with the different speeds because in the same amount of time this ball here is traveling this distance while this ball is traveling this much larger distance in the same amount of time that means this ball is slow and this ball is fast but that's not all the fun things that we can do with spacing we can actually use it to put yet another information in there when we add drawings what we could do is we could let's go exactly in the middle between the two frames timewise and let's also draw a ball directly in the middle between those two key frames but this is not giving us a new information we still have two balls moving with the same different speeds but what we can do to add a new information instead of adding once again a drawing exactly in the middle we're gonna add one that is much closer to the original position that's a much closer the spacing between the first and the second frames first frame to the second frame is relatively small while the distance between the second and the third frame is larger than the distance was before this means we increased the spacing and this gives us the impression of acceleration and we can also go in at the end of our little animation and here at frame six I'm gonna put in a new new frame and once again we're not putting it in the middle because that would not that would just keep the speed that the ball was already having but we're saying okay you are slowing down now before or while you move towards the last frame you're doing that in a way that looks like it's slowing down and this is the result one thing that especially 2d animators use to plan their animation or to visualize what spacing they wanted to have our timing charts but I've also seen a 3d animator plan that the motions of different body parts with that now timing charge is looking like this you draw you mark the first frame and the last frame you connect them in a way like this you could use this to indicate how the motion is actually supposed to go but you know in our case it's just a straight line and then usually do that before you animate and this time we do it afterwards and then you mark where you want the drawings to go and you can use that to communicate with another animator or if you have a complex animation you know with all the different body parts doing different speeds at different times you can use it to to note down the different spacings that you want everything to have and here you can now clearly see that these spacings are getting larger and then from larger it is getting smaller again but now we are slowly running into a little bit of a challenge namely that different people use different terms to explain the same things for example colloquially you would say speed a physics professor would say velocity and animators usually talk in terms of spacing and I try to always give you as many terms as possible so that you always know what people mean when they talk about this but the animation terms are probably the ones that you should definitely keep in mind and now for this the term used a lot is ease in and ease out if we define these here as the keyframes then looking from the view of the keyframe we have we ease out of this keyframe and we ease into this keyframe of course this example was not very fluent looking because we are using so little frames if you can use the same patterns that we just learned about with more frames and here's an example how this then I think this is with a stretch of 20 something frames 22 frames but one of them at the top has ease-in and ease-out applied and in the one at the bottom the spacing between every frames is the same they start and stop at the same time so in animation terms what they have they have the same timing a motion like the one down here is called a linear motion so linear is when all of the frames have the same spacing and motions that are completely linear from beginning to end are very rare in nature because most of the time you need need to build up speed or you need to catch something by slowing it down now a motion would not slow down if for example something is falling or something is going like at full speed into a wall then you don't have a deceleration but you're still this energy had to come from somewhere so most of the time you have either built up or a wind down em and most of the time pure linear motion looks wrong and mechanic maybe there are robots who can build up a linear motion immediately and come to a stop immediately if they're built that way and light enough but in most cases you need to think about where's the energy coming from how is it building up or how is it being caught and then you don't have a linear motion anymore you already know the terms for the ones above we have a spacing that gets larger and larger so we have an ease out and then we have a point where the spacing gets smaller and smaller so we have an ease in now the important thing is if you dedicate to ease in where is out that you need to keep this pattern going if you break it you will have a weird jerk motion in your animation so for example if you said that in this part of the animation you want to do and eat out you can't have a frame where you have the spacing here and a frame here because then it will look like it got faster and then it somehow got stuck and gods got slower again and then it immediately gets faster again you usually don't want that if you don't have a reason to break this pattern you should not do that but now enough with balls moving from left to right let's do something more fun and something more practical let's look at how to animate a mic drop and let's talk about engines but welcome to mic drop physics 101 and now we're getting close to what this tutorial is actually about you're gonna learn how to do the bouncing ball and the truth is if you already started or you know in the near future making the bouncing ball will just be a couple of clicks for you it's really really easy to do but the thing is this exercise is actually not about the buttons and the keyboard shortcuts that you need to make them it is actually not even about making a ball bounce like you don't want to make a short film how is this now that's not the point here the point here is to understand the physics behind it and more importantly this is all about the free fall and the free fall isn't everything and it will be in your more complex animation in the future all the time when a character lets them safe fall into a couch or if you just let your arms drop this is the free fall at work so you really need to know this because you need to put it in almost all of your animations and the reason why the bouncing ball is so great for doing that is because it's an opportunity for experiments because it's so easy to do you can do it again with different parameters try different ways of animating try different timings different spacings and just see what happens how it feels different and we at the beginning will focus a lot on the real physical loss behind it and you might be wondering why do I as an animator need to know that I only want to do cartoon physics why do I need to know real physics and the reason is because if you have realistic physics in your animation you can create a more tangible world you can make a world where falling actually hurts we're falling feels dangerous or where heavy objects actually you know feel heavy and threatening if you need this in your animation then you need to apply the laws of physics and even when you want to do cartoon physics it's exaggerating the real world and in order to exaggerate something you need to know first what it is that you are exaggerating makes sense right so let's drop something and I was thinking you know I never say something clever in front of the microphone so I should use this opportunity to do a mic drop my mic drop height is a 1 meter 20 or 3 feet-9 and if I'll let the microphone go I can see in the video footage it's exactly 1 miss you see long or half a second as some people would say now let's think for a second about what happened here while I was holding the mic there were two forces applied to the mic one is gravity pulling the mic down and the other one is my hand and when the mic is completely still at the force of gravity and the force of my hand is exactly the same that's why nothing is happening to the microphone now if I open my hand the force of my hand is immediately gone and only the force of gravity is affecting the mic and this actually causes the acceleration of gravity which is minus nine nine point eight one meter per second - yeah accelerate the mic towards the ground and because scientists were getting tired of just dropping objects to see how long they fall they came up with clever formulas like this one where we can just put the height that we already know and the acceleration of gravity that we already know and and then we get this an equation that we can actually solve towards the time and with some math magic we get the result that our microphone Falls for 0.49 seconds and when I first calculated this mmm I realized how I always somehow assumed that it would be shorter I mean half a second is relatively long it's time enough to say one me see see and that is kind of long so what about a higher distance like let's take a 20 meter tall building which is about four storeys or 65 feet and again we put that in the same formula do some math magic and the result is 2.0 two seconds I think this is really long this is one Mississippi two Mississippi and that is something that you need to know when you animate like giant spaceship or giants for example if you have a giant whose bottom is up 20 meters in the air if they want to sit down by just like letting themselves fall they will take two seconds to reach the ground and you know if the giant is not just letting himself carelessly fall but like really getting slowly comfy then this motion would be even longer I don't want you two to learn this formula by heart or something like this but I just want you to keep a general idea in mind and the big takeaway here is that big objects moving far away they appear slow on our website we have a free fall calculator and I might change the look of it a little bit but you know the basic function should remain the same you can just put in a distance and then you can calculate the fall duration and you could use this to play around a little bit but let's be honest most animators don't want to be bothered by doing math so let's have a look at how you can cheat and simplify this process I want to show you some easy ways to animate the free fall and we're gonna start with the traditional handmade way we're actually gonna draw every single frame in a 2d software and 3d animators I would ask you to stay with me maybe even try this yourself you don't need to actually draw the frame if you can't draw there are some tricks how you can out yourself so that you don't have to actually you don't actually need to tablet or anything to do this exercise now the first pattern the first rule that I want to show you is the odd rule and if you want you can already do this alongside with me I'm using then the open source 2d drawing and a painting software called critter and you can download it for free on critter org so this is more or less how creature looks when you open it for the first time you can make a new file either by going here at file new or you just press in the middle of this gray area a good size for any animation project really is a thousand nine hundred and twenty pixels of white and a thousand and eighty pixels high because this is the full HD video standard the video standard that most televisions across the world use at the moment and also many cinema resolutions are around this full HD resolution now this will change one day one day will get 4k but for now keep a thousand nine hundred thousand eighty in and 72 pixel per inch is the pixel density on a digital screen so this is okay for printing this will be too little but you know we're just doing a digital project here so I think this is all the settings we have to do and we created our first project now the interface is suited more for painting at the moment so we have to change our workspace from the default workspace to the animation workspace and then one thing I also like to have at the right side is the brush preset so we can change quickly between different brushes and you find the brush presets here in settings Dockers and here they are a bunch of drawing tools that we can use another way to get some drawing tools or to build yourself a quick access bar is when you click the right mouse button then you can change your color here and you can put in some brush presets there are some predefined views already you can have paint tools in our case I think we would want to have something like sketch tools and yeah let's go the most important thing of course for animation and this is what the drawing the animation workspace actually introduced is the timeline down here which is where our animated frames will find its place now before we start animating you need to make a frame on the timeline because if we already put something on on this layer and then create a new frame by selecting the first frame and clicking here you will see that our frame has been cleared it's an empty frame right from the start and the drawing that we already did is gone so make sure that before you start animating you already created your first frame I think alternatively you can also right-click and make a new frame from here if you have a drawing tablet or a Cintiq or something like this you could now directly start drawing but you know if you're not that much into drawing I don't blame you you can use for example the ellipse tool right here and it's actually gonna use our brush so we can just if we can just do this and get some very nice sketchy lines and of course you can hold down shift to get perfect circles so yeah if you want you can just keep doing that but before we start animating for the odds rule we need something like a grid and we can make that really roughly we just need if we just need to draw some some some spacings here 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ok I got 45 units from top to bottom that should be enough and the reason why we need this grid is because we're actually gonna measure our spacing between the frames because the odd rule says that the spacing increases to the next uneven number this is actually a physically accurate so if we're gonna animate according to the odd rule we will actually get a realistic fall and from the previous chapter we know that you know when we did the mic drop dropping something from one meter 20 takes approximately half a second to fall which in a 24 frames per second document as mine currently is you can see that down here this would be at the 12 frame mark personally I don't like animation software that starts counting the first frame with frame zero because you know this frame actually exists this frame is frame 1 Adobe After Effects for example that's that - I don't like it if the first frame is frame zero so what I'm gonna do is say if my start frame is actually frame 1 and also I think I'm gonna take this grid off this frame I just gonna empty it and put it into a new layer and this way we can always see the grid even as we start making new frames here what we are going to do we are not actually putting a drawing on every single frame because there's a lot of work and many animators found out that in many cases 12 frames per second is already enough only when you do very fast motions like running or some some physical fighting stuff there's some stuff that you can only do on higher frame rates but a lot of the times if you see like animated television they work on 12 frames per second but to keep our option open you know we might do something really fast in the same film we keep our project settings at 24 frames per second and what we're going to do is we just draw in every other frames and this is what animators call the working on twos and you drawing on every other frames means that you are working on twos now I'm going to use the ellipse tool too and I hold shift well I'm have to click first and then I'll shift pressed to get a nice and round circle now we can use this transform layer tool here to transform our this is the pivot point to transform our ball I'm going to put it right here so that the bottom of all is lining up with a unit in our grid so this is the first friend first frame is being hauled for two frames for frame 1 and frame 2 so the next frame we create here on frame 3 right click new frame if you would be drawing this by hand to see the previous drawing you can switch on the onion skin for the particular layer by clicking on this little lamp I can here and now you can see that our previous frame is showing through in red and there are some options that you can use if you click on this onion this onion skin symbol this window will open and you can put in how much you want the next and the previous frames to show through now because I'm working I want to keep working with this perfect sight circle I'm not actually you know if I would be drawing frame by frame I could now draw the next frame but I'm gonna make my life even easier and sheet even more I don't make a new frame from scratch I copy this frame by holding ctrl and dragging this frame onto frame three now you can see we have a new frame indicated by the blue box and we can just take this ball and now move it down onto the height of the first unit in our grid so the first spacing according to the odd rule is a 1 if we go on our grid layer we can actually write this down we already did the first the first unit down and according to the odd rule the next uneven number is our next spacing 1 2 3 so the next ball will be on that height over there important we need to switch the layer again now click on that previous frame and with control control click and drag we can pull it out 2 frames of course we need to modify it again with the transform tool over here and put it on the next spacing maybe you could switch on onion skinning to see how it lines up this looks quite good the next uneven spacing the next uneven number is five one two three four five over here again control click control interact and we just continue like this until we have reached frame twelve [Music] you might be wondering why are we actually ending up on frame thirteen is because you know we already count starting with frame one so if we have a duration of 12 then the next step the next big step in our loop in our animation is on the frame 13 this actually took a while for me to wrap my head around if animators are talking of stuff happening in 12 frames or in six frames like walk cycles or something like this or or dance patterns what they mean is a length of 12 frames so the end or the next animation next pose is one frame further another thing that you might be wondering about is while I was drawing onto the layer with the grid it created new frames you see that the create created new frames of the the chart expanding and this is because of this option on it's called auto auto frame mode and basically what it does if when I start drawing something anything on a layer that has animation on it it creates a copy of everything that is already on this frame plus whatever I started drawing you see here it was empty and then when I put in the squiggle the squiggle appears at frame 21 this is not necessarily what I want because I just want this grid to be here stationary so I'm going to delete all of these frames and just move the last frame here so right from the beginning we have our grid now this is actually a physically accurate animation we have a all being dropped from the distance of one meter 20 and because of the odd rule its animated animated physically correctly and the cool thing is that this art will even applies to rolling or falling on slanted surfaces for example if you would roll the ball down a surface like that you know the distance is one three five and so on would still be the same so this is not only applying to free fall this is also applying to any you know sideways sliding and stuff like that another very rough rule that might help you to estimate if an object is falling correctly is that it if if it is a fourth of the way down in half the time and then you got an accurate animation you can see that right here right in the middle if we cut this in four equal more or less four equal parts then we have a fourth of the distance at frame seven which is directly in the middle of our animation but you know what animators want to have an even easier counting to the next uneven numbers who needs that we need a more visual system and this is a system that has been used by 2d animators for a very long time it's always using the half distance to create eases all you need for this is to know your first frame position and your last frame position and then you can always go exactly in the middle always having the spacing to create in this case an ease out here and here and here and here and now we can animate that onto our ball layer this time I'm gonna I'm gonna actually draw you can use the arrow keys to go back and forth on the timeline alright I'm going to put in our next frame next frame next one and because I'm working on the layer that we already have I'm not copying what I saw previously but you know it's drawing it on the same layer that the other animation is in and here is the ground now if we play those two back-to-back maybe let's change the length of our animation which we can do here to frame 17 so we can see a looping quicker yeah as you can see just by looking at the distance the sheeting way the laughing way makes the animation slower in the beginning here and snappier in the end this is actually playing into the hands of exaggeration making stuff more snappy and more powerful so yeah this is the method that a lot of animators animators use it's not 100% accurate but you know it gives you an ease in and it gives you a very large distance at the end by the way if you would record all falling it could be that you get in a frame right before the impact that you see a ball being here this can happen when you're filming you know if the camera happened to make the photo in that moment then and you have the ball close to the ground there are some animators who say that this is okay I don't like it because you have what I talked talked about earlier you know if I want to have an ease in I want to have a ball accelerating because of gravity I don't want it to cushion right before it hits the ground I want the impact to to be really there now there are some animators who actually make an additional frame here so there's a slowing down before the ball hits the ground so so it almost kind of look like it almost kind of looks like the ball is like stopping and really slamming into the ground after a short little break if you will I'll I'm also not a big fan of this method but you know just so you know there are different ways to do this I personally like to have it as pure as possible you know if I decided to make an Easton because gravity is working on this ball then you know I should do it it should do it how it is in its purest form that the spacing is always getting bigger we can turn this thing easily into a loop just by copy and pasting frames though that we already have we don't even need to to draw new frames and the reason for that is on the way down all that happens to the ball up here when we let it go is that the acceleration of gravity is speeding it up faster and faster and faster as you already saw but here when it has the most amount of energy our hypothetic material is deflecting that energy and putting it right back into the ball but now the gravitational acceleration is actually fighting against against the ball reducing this momentum until it reaches the part where no longer has any momentum or velocity in the upwards direction and then it's coming down again so all that we have to do is just maybe remove this artifact here all we have to do is just go always go one frame back hit control and drag it over to be our next frame go to one of the previous frames dragging it over one frame more over one frame or dragging it over and now we can set this at a loop our loop is actually going to frame 24 because the frame 25 is identical with frame 1 we don't need to show that too at times if we would then this frame would be shown three times and if we hit play we can see the ball falling down and jumping up don't end up any our congratulations if you followed along if you did this for the first time you created your first bouncing ball one very physically accurate accurate and one lazy one in the next segment we're gonna have a look at how to do a bouncing ball in 3d and this time I wanna ask the 2d animators to stick along because there's actually a lot of 2d animation software you wear you can animate in a similar way what this way is we're gonna talk about in a little bit first I want to introduce you to this software it's called a blender it's basically a complete 3d pipeline you can make a full feature film in in blender you can download the software under blender.org and if you open it for the first time it should look a little bit like this you need to navigate in 3d space with the middle mouse button if you just click and hold and drag the middle mouse button this is what you see if you hit shift and the middle mouse button you can drag the view like this and if you hit control and the middle mouse button you can zoom in and out like this and I think also with the mouse wheel yes you can do this you select an object by right-clicking it in this case we have a cube a lamp and a camera with a you can deselect everything or select everything if you hit the comma key on the numpad you are focusing on the selected object and this is very helpful to you know work on different things at different times and make your view orbit around what you currently want to focus on there also is the command shift C which does two things C centers your views and it also resets this 3d cursor the 3d cursor is where you create this is the position where you create new objects at and sometimes you can also use the 3d cursor to rotate objects around it so if you hit shift C your view centered and your cursor is in the middle again now let's delete this cube because we don't want to do announcing cube we want to do a bouncing ball so all we do is we select let me make sure that we have this cube selected and then we hit the Delete key it's gonna ask us if we really want to do it and you can just click on delete and then it's gone and in its place we're gonna make a new object by clicking on add mesh and UV sphere and here we have a new sphere now we can hit the tab key to switch to something called an edit mode and the edit mode is actually used by modelers when you want to make a form that is a little more compact complex you can make a form out of all these little points in in 3d space as you can see I'm going in and out of edit mode and you can do that with the tab key in blender like in many other animation software objects have a pivot point that they rotate and scale around you can make your life a lot easier by choosing the pivot point smartly for example I know that later on I want to squash the ball and I can squash the ball by using s and the middle mouse button and dragging the mouse down what we can see is that it's squashing two wars the enter of the ball but if the ball was on the ground in order to keep it on the ground I would have to always translate the ball down so that it is on the ground for example if I later realize that the ball is squashing too much then I have to Dees quash it and push it back up again or if I wanted to squash more I have to squash it more and put it more towards the ground this kind of counter animation you should always avoid if possible and in this case we can easily get around this by having the pivot point at the bottom of the ball to get the pivot point there we shift all the vertices all the three and for 3d information of the ball up so that the pivot point is at the bottom of the ball we can select all of our 3d points in edit mode and click on the axis on this axis arrow to move it up if we hold control it will move along in in fixed increments and there actually is an increment where the pivot point here is exactly at the bottom now we can squash the ball and it stays on its place down here at the bottom and we already used this manipulator where you can just click on any of the axis to move our ball around you can switch that on and off here I think this type of manipulator is very useful I usually also activate this manipulator and you can see them both at once if you hit the shift key while clicking up on them you can have the translation manipulator and the rotation manipulator at the same time rotation doesn't make much sense anymore with our pivot point being down there but in if you later work with character X it's really good to have access to rotation and and transformation in the very quick manner some menus in blender are hidden at this site when you look over here there's this little plus symbol and if we click that we can open a big long sidebar with a bunch of information on it I want to call your attention to these this these location values over here to see that when I drag this axis when I drag the blue axis you can see that the Z value is changing it's growing larger as I put the ball higher in the air and on the on the ground it's zero one thing that you can also do you can just go into these values I have the ball selected that's why I get to see the balls values and I can click I can just click on here and enter a value and it's gonna position the object at this value there are also a lot of things that you can do to feel more at home in the lender if you are in any panel you can go to the edge until you see the mouse cursor like this you can right click and you can split an already existing window and give it a new part and then you can actually fill those panels with different content depending on what you want through these dropdowns here and here and actually even the 3d view that we have here we could change to be something else now what might be really good for us to have is a so-called dope sheet I'm gonna put it here and here we're gonna put the graph editor and you're gonna see what they are for in a second just to show you how you how you get access to them yeah those workspace settings are specific to the blender file so if you made your file nice like this once it will open with the the windows that you left them with in on any other computer and in blender once again we can go to frame zero and we can actually put something on frame zero but our main animation is going to start playing and frame one because that is what's is set as the start frame down here so some people use frame zero and blender to store the default positions of a Rick so then if you have a mess something up you can just copy your frame 0 and you have restored everything to normality we are just gonna go to frame 1 for now and gonna define our starting position which is the ball up in the air to get it in the air we're just gonna drag the blue axis so it is only moving along the blue axis gonna put it a little bit in the air and now we need to tell the software to keep this position in mind this position right here needs to be tied to the frame and to do that we hit I on our keyboard and it's asking us what value it should is set a keyframe for most of the time times you want to click location and rotation we only change the location so we just want to save the location value for now click on that and you see stuff happening in the dope sheet and in the graph editor what I did in the dope sheet it's just showing us that on this frame 1 it has keyframe values stored and we can actually look at what keyframe values it has stored it has stored keyframe values for location X Y and zette now one thing that will make your work a lot easier is if you activate this button down here which is the auto key button the thing is if we don't have this on and we just would go to frame let's say from 18 and we're gonna gonna position our ball somewhere else once we move the cursor the time again it will jump back to the previous set Efram it didn't set a new keyframe for our new position if we hit this Auto key button what it will do is it will actually record a keyframe at the current position if we move an object if we move an object on frame 15 you can see we have new keyframes here on the dope sheet but what else can we see is that here this value is actually helped like the X location key friends this keyframe and this keyframe they have the exact same value namely zero as you can see here x and y are both 0 on both keyframes that's why I have this bar in between but the zet location has a different value on this keyframe than it has on that keyframe and that's why there is no bar here to indicate that the computer is doing the interpolation between those two frames and that is the big difference that we have between drawing frame by frame and using a key framing software in a key framing software you just set key frames with a within a larger distance on the timeline and the computer is calculating how the object moves in between there and I say once again this is not a thing exclusively for 3d there's many 2d software that works with rigs in a similar way it might be called different like Flash Adobe Flash now Adobe animate calls it motion tweens but it's the same it's the same method you put an object there tell the computer keep this coordinate in mind X frames later you put another keyframe you tell the software keep this new coordinate in mind and interpolate between those you can navigate in the dope sheet in a similar fashion how you navigate in the 3d view if you use the mouse wheel you can zoom in and out if you click the middle mouse button you can shift the view around and what I would like to do right now is to move our test frame that we just put somewhere I want to move that on frame 13 so we have the same time in as we had in our 2d version to move or and select keyframes first of all you can use the right mouse button and if you click on a keyframe in the dopesheet summary it's gonna select everything that is under it we can also just select specific values like if we just want to move around or copy the X Y or Z location we can just go in and just hit just select that keyframe for any keyframes that we have selected if we hit G we can move them around and this is also a key that I can use in the 3d view if I am in the 3d view and I hit G here I can also move a 3d object around but you know most of the time is very helpful to actually use the axis so that I know exactly what X is I'm moving in my case I just wanna I just I don't want to move a specific coordinate I want to move the entire thing so I click on the sheet' summary and move that to frame 13 just a couple frames back for me there we have it and I'm also not sure I don't think we hit zero exactly I don't think we hit zero exactly in the Z location so we can go on this frame make sure you are on the correct frame if you are you should see those values in yellow that means that there is a keyframe set here and we can just go in and put in zero to put the ball exactly on the ground now we have the ball going from top to bottom in 12 frames and again this is our height of 1 meter 20 we can make the ball go back up by copying and pasting a previous keyframe we just need to to select the keyframe of our first first position by using the dopesheet summary we can hit ctrl C and then go to frame 25 and hit ctrl-v if you now play this I hope you will notice that something isn't quite right here like - what is going on this is looking more like a yo-yo it's slowing down and then coming back up and we can figure out what exactly is going wrong by using the graph editor and to do that we first need to select our object and there you can see already some some things appearing and what we want to focus on of course is these that location we can make everything else invisible and just click on the set location because that is the only thing that we animated so far in the graph editor you can hit the home button or my keyboard is a position one button to zoom in on the current view on everything that you can see in the current view or you can just select everything and use the numpad comma key the same TV you can also use in the 3d view to focus on an object you can use that also in the graph editor and now we can get a nice view look at how our motion looks on a mathematical graph doesn't that sound exciting so it's time to dig into what an animation curve is and don't worry it's not too complicated you will develop a feeling for it relatively quickly it basically is a coordinate system that you might remember from math or physics class at the x-axis we have just time we have frame 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 just the passing time on the x axis on the y axis we have the transformation value and in our case this is the that location and if you look at if you look at our example here here we have a very high is application this is the highest at location and then it's coming down at first slowly and then the distances grow larger and larger maybe let's have another look at the the 2d animation that we already did let's make two animation grids here at the x-axis we have time so we have frame 1 Frame 2 frame 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 and here we have the same and let's have a look what that actually means now on this axis of course we don't have a falling ball we have a ball going from left to right but let's pretend it's falling and it has its highest value let's say value 10 here and then in the next frame it's going down by 1 value and it's going down by 1 value and and so on so it's always going one frame further in time and one value down in the coordinate system one frame further in time and one frame further in the one unit further in the in the coordinate system another frame down and another unit in the coordinate system and so on so for linea we get a straight curve like this because the distance going down and to the right is always the same it's just a straight curve now in the case of an ease this distance here is smaller than a full unit so instead of a full unit it's for the beginning it's still staying up here and only gradually catching up speed and as you can see those distances they are like almost two units compared to the other ones so here for example we have a a difference of two units and then in this case we have an ease in again so at this end the the units the difference between our frames are getting smaller and smaller again and in the graph this is looking like this so what we have now is an S curve now if you look at the curve in blender we can recognize this S shape but we don't want to have a ball that is easing out and then easing in again what we actually want is what we have in the 2d animation is wall as well it's just an ease out because the acceleration of gravity is kicking in and then it's at its highest speed right before it hits ground and at the highest speed right when it starts jumping up against so there is no ease here there's no softening at the curve and in Venda we can go right into the curve and manipulate them specifically what we need to change is this middle frame that's here in the dope sheet and that is here in the curves and we can select those curve points with the middle Mouse with the right mouse click and we can select those tangent handles to change the appearance of our curve now if you grab the left tangent handle we can make the left side of the curve look a lot better this is kind of what we want we want to have an ease at this one side and then we wanted to go down with no ease in but what have we don't here it's just shooting over the point and it caused some kind of an of my it will go through the ground here as you can see and this these things you kind of want to avoid because they get really difficult to control you should preferably always have a point that you have the full control over at the top and such of such a curve now what we need to do to shape the curve into the way that we need it and we need to select thank you friend that we want to change and go into the key menu off the of the graph editor and change the handle type to free and now we can actually select each tangent handle individually and shape them how we want them to be and this is the shape that we want to be going for we want to only have the ease out here and this is in here and around the impact it's just you know it's at the highest speed it doesn't know that it is about to hit the ground it's just gonna just gonna hit the ground full speed and then all the energy is directly transferred back into the ball and it's jumping again now we can set this up as a loop again if we go to the end frame value here and enter 24 and now we can play our animation by either hitting the play button here or using the short keyboard shortcut alt a and there we have it a ball that is accelerating at the top and just going full speed into the ground at the bottom and now I would actually like to invite you to play around a little bit with the three keyframes that you have in 2d this is a little bit more difficult because to play around with stronger easing or weaker easing you would have to redraw all those frames but in 3d you only have the the tangents of three keyframes that you can play with to get vastly different fields of the ball bounds now let me show you what I mean you could just go in and for example experiment with the length what what did we say two seconds for 20 meter falls so let's select all the keyframes with a and if you put this green timeline cursor all the way over here you can hit s for scaling the keyframes and you can scale them to be at roughly at the two second mark which would be yeah 25 24 times 2 would be 48 so round here ish and then you can you can play this back and it will look like a 12 a fall from a 20 meter distance then another thing that you can experiment with is you can grab the tangent handles and pull them out further and just see what happens oh I just want to have the tangent handle and just see what happens now it's a real slow fall at the beginning and then it it's very we can even exaggerate that even more if can make it even faster at the end see how that looks yeah it doesn't look correct but you know we can we can use as this to find some interesting results that we might want to use in some more cartoony animation really don't be afraid to just to just play around with these parameters and to try different speeds and different steepness for the tangents and different things for the tangents to get a little bit of a feel for what is doing what another nice thing that I would like to show you is a smiley revert this channel timing to the time from 1 meter 20 there we have it all back to what it was before it's strong here because overall an object always has to keep its volume show you what I mean right here if I have a ball and I squash it on the ground if I would squash it like this I would have all this mass that is gone I don't know where it's just it just disappeared the mass of the object needs to be the same in total so what it does it goes out to the side and looks like this maybe more like this so this mass this mass up here went into these sides and to do this in blender what we can do is to squash it down by pressing s and the middle mouse button pressing it down and then making it bigger again so that it also goes out in size this value is not really row K recorded in a way that is useful for us so I'm going to revert it at first for now what we need to do first is record the scale value the normal scale that our ball has and you can see it here it's just one one one that is the default scale now we can put a keyframe in the way that you already know by hitting the i key and key scaling but another thing that we can do is to actually key values in blender on the value slider we can hover over one of over all of these scale values and press I and by doing so we just set a keyframe you can see it here here's X Y is at scale got a keyframe here we've got a keyframe from the auto key it did set a keyframe but you know it's the same as we can see through the bar nothing happens between those values and of course we also need the same keyframe at the end again so for whatever we what we whatever we are doing here when it hits the ground it needs to normalize by the time that it comes back up I do see a lot of people doing the bouncing ball the wrong Way and I don't understand why they don't see that this is not really working is that they go to this middle position and then they squash the ball first of all they don't squash it the right way and that they need to also make it go out again but you know they just squash it and if we play this back you should see that this looks rather odd it's going it squashing while it is on the way down and if we can really not leave it that way because the reason why its grab squashes is is because it is hitting the ground because it is hitting the ground the energy of the hit is causing the ball to distort so it cannot start squashing while it is on the way down what we can do is we can take the X Y Z scale value from here and if you want to copy and paste in all of these channels you need to select them with shift and then we can select all of these three and just hit ctrl C and we're gonna paste them right before the ball hits the ground because on that frame the ball was still not squashed it didn't hit the ground yet so there's no reason to squash and on the next frame we actually have the squash happening and then usually the ball doesn't need the whole way up to to to go out of his squashed form again but is out of the squash relatively quickly and because we just copy and paste that the default values we can paste them here as well and then we have a ball squashing only on impact and this of course is a very very short moment in time we can barely see the ball being squashed there at the bottom and one thing that I like to do with bouncing balls is to have them on the ground for multiple frames I mean we can do that with the dope sheet but maybe it would be nice to see what we're doing in the graph editor so let's select our object and let's focus on the location values maybe let's do it in the dope sheet that's easier to see so what I want is for these location values for these location values again we need to select them if we want to paste all three of them I don't copy them I want them to be hold for one two that's maybe but this maybe hold it for three frames let's see what happens and I pasted them again now we also need to shift the last key because otherwise our ball would need a shorter amount of time to come back up than what it needed to come down so I need to shift it for the same amount hitting G and going one two to the right now as we can see in the curve editor or something is happening here namely it's hitting the ground and it's coming back up and then going back to the ground again this is not what we want to happen we want it to stay on the ground and all we have to do is just click on the keyframes and put the tangents to where we want them to be and now we have the ball hitting the ground staying there very squashed D squashing and then going back up maybe it could also not be fully back into its alt shape at this position so we look for this scale and shift this one frame further or another frame yeah like this and now if you play this we have a few more frames to see the ball on the ground let's put it back into a loop and how it framed 27 and yes see how we just defined the squash a lot more you could make the fall a little softer let's see see how this looks now this middle position of course gives us one more position to play with you could even make it even longer make it shorter you could experiment how it looks when the ball is not squashed on this this first impact frame and gets squashed while it is on the ground you could try different speeds you could squash it only a little bit you could not squash it at all and just see how these different things look overall I have to say if you if you followed along here congratulations you know now the very basics of all bouncing in 2d and 3d now there will be more free tutorials like this one but if you want more right now please get our premium honors tutorial by purchasing it you make sure that we can make more free content and we can make it quicker and better and on top of that you will get more exercises you will get F better at animation faster and in the premium bonus tutorial we have a look at how you can animate a floppy tail on the side of your bouncing ball both in 2d and with an actual Rick we're gonna have a look at the physical law of inertia which is the law that explains why standing in a driving bus is so difficult and how it translate to the animation principles of drag follow-through and overlap them you get access to the animator island elite Facebook group where you can post your work looking at feedback on your demo reel or shot that you're animating on from me or other members from the group there also will be exclusive critiquing events where I talk about the animation submitted in this group exclusively for the group members only so if you want to be a part of that we are selling this not for $24.99 tutorial and become an even better animator thank you for watching

Channel: AnimatorIslandTV

Views: 14,760

Keywords: bouncing ball tutorial, 2d animation, 3d animation, bouncing ball, animation basics, how to, blender (software), animation tutorial, bouncing ball animation, animation tutorial for beginners, krita, krita animation, krita tutorial for beginners, krita animation tutorial, physics, timing, spacing, ease in and ease out in animation, ease in ease out, ease in, ease out, animation physics, 3d animation physics, timing charts animation, timing chart

Id: V0cWXIFdymI

Length: 76min 34sec (4594 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 22 2018