Week 5: Anticipation

Yeah, you wouldn't know it from my previous week 5 planning sketch, but this assignment was actually about anticipation followed by a realistically moving bouncing ball, not "how to get a ball through a fancy obstacle course". So, I pulled way back and just went about the animation the way Bobby suggested I do it, which is to layer the animation. Do the basic timing first. Just up and down with no spacing (back or forth). Then I just layered all the other stuff in, like squash and stretch. Then I did the spacing (translation of object from left to right), and finally the rotation so that the stretched ball would follow the arc of action.

Oh, I actually started with the anticipation. The way I envisioned it was like one of those "test your strength" games they have at carnivals, where you have to hit a target as hard as you can with a heavy hammer. You have to have a deliberate upswing and then pull that hammer down for all you're worth if you're going to get any power out of the swing. So if the squash is the anticipation, the stretch just prior would be the "anticipation of the anticipation", which is one of those things where the more you do it, the cartoonier it gets.

Only area where I went wrong is the direction of the anticipation. As you can see from the still above, I have the ball leaning in the direction it plans to go, when really it should be anticipating the opposite direction (my mentor, Charles Alleneck, pointed out to me). There are a few other minor tweaks it needs; fixing stickiness on one of the contacts that I somehow missed when I did my clean up pass (I found that having two contact frames towards the final bounces just doesn't work, so I fixed it, but missed one of them), and not diminishing the upward momentum of the ball so quickly. But other than that, Charles said it was a job well done.

My only regret is that I didn't try different types of anticipation. Seeing what some of the other students did, I realized that my approach was pretty boring. Some of them had the ball roll, or even scoot back and then start rotating like mad to build up speed, like muscle cars revving at a red light, and then "PYOOOOooooooo!!" - it was off. Some had the ball squish like setting hips into the ground in order to launch.

So I emailed a suggestion to the good folks at AnimationMentor, suggesting that they revise the assignment to focus a little more on the anticipation by having us do three separate bounces, with a different anticipation each time.

Would be great to have another week to work on it, but alas, we're moving ahead.

Here's my unrevised animation: http://kenshi.daeva.org/animation/C1_Sess5 _Assignment_10.avi