Week 4: Squash and Stretch

Week 4 Assignment

This is a little late in coming, but I wanted this to kind of be a repository for all my assignments and what I learned from them. The assignment here was to take the bouncing ball from the previous week and add squash and stretch to it. I tried several different approaches. In Richard Williams' book "The Animator's Survival Kit", he talks about stretching into the contact with the ground, then squashing, and then stretching out of it, off the ground.

My first tests with this approach were not satisfactory to my eye, but looking back, that was probably due to timing/spacing issues, and not due to the approach. A fellow student's 2D pencil test of a bouncing ball did catch my attention though, and he had the ball maintain a perfectly round shape except for 3 places - frame before contact was slightly stretched, then it made contact in the recovered position (perfectly round), then squashed down, stretched off the ground, and then back to round as it continued through the arc of the next bounce. That's the technique I ended up employing.

What my mentor and other students had to say? Too sticky. Seems to stick to the ground at the contact points.

That week, I got to take part in a special interactive session with Bobby Beck (CEO and president of AnimationMentor, former Pixar animator) where he took our files and went through some things with us in a more interactive way. He used a new Q&A tool where he could see the chat, so he would ask everybody (I would say there were about 30 people in the session) a question such as "What makes an object look heavy?" and we all would type in our answers. And then he looked at a few of the students' files to illustrate points, one of them being mine.

First of all, he got on my case for not following directions (oops...). It was supposed to be animated from a pure side view. I had a teeny bit of perspective on my shot, because I wanted it to be clear that it was in a racquetball court. I thought you would still be able to see the arcs just fine, but I promised to be more careful and follow the directions more explicitly in the future.

Oh, the overachiever part of the assignment was to add another ball with different weight. He suggested a bowling ball in the lecture, but again, I was civilly disobedient and just did a heavy ball.

So anyhow, in the special session, his comments were: take out the squash and stretch in the heavy ball completely, to make it really heavy and rigid (like a bowling ball), diminish the height of the bounces even more and get rid of the last tiny bounce entirely. On the bouncing ball, his main comments were to add more squash and stretch in the air and make contact before squashing.

See the animation here: http://kenshi.daeva.org/animation/C1_Sess4_Assignment_05heavy.mov