Hi and welcome to this first lesson where we're going to cover a bouncing ball now, I want to record
myself actually talking to you because I wanted to connect a little more than typically me sitting behind
the computer here and talking, because I want you to understand that I know your frustration when you're
learning animation, especially when it's three animation.
You're basically learning several things at once.
You're learning animation, which is its own thing, and then you're learning a specific software.
On top of that animation has its own principles that apply to any software that you're going to learn.
And then on top of that, you're trying to learn a specific software.
So I totally understand your frustration.
I've been there myself not that long ago and I'm always learning anyways.
But I wanted to make this quick video at the beginning to let you know I know where you're coming from
and hopefully that you'll trust me.
And the reason why I'm teaching you the things I'm teaching you and the order in which I'm teaching
them.
That being said, I'm specifically talking about the bouncing ball.
I was super excited to learn animation when I first started and was frustrated pretty quickly by these
very what I thought were basic exercises like the bouncing ball.
But the reality is they are very, very important and they are the foundation of animation and learning
animation.
It's going to teach you wait, it's going to teach you timing and spacing.
These things are going to be what you're going to apply to animation from day one till the day you die
animating.
Hopefully that's a long career of enjoying it, but it's fundamental and you really need to learn it.
I was frustrated when I first started because I just thought it was too basic and I wanted to get into
doing character animation right away.
But what you'll find is if you do that and you skip these foundational things is you're going to be
even more frustrated when you go into character animation, because if you can't animate a bouncing
ball very well, there's no way in the world you're going to be able to animate a character very well.
So just accept this journey.
This is part of the journey and you'll move through it quickly.
The more you do it and the more attention you pay to actually, you know, understanding these fundamentals
and taking seriously these early kind of lessons and exercises like the bouncing ball.
So with that being said, let's take a look at this.
Thanks for watching.
So hopefully you've downloaded the scene file, the ball animations start and you're following along,
or you will follow along in your second viewing of this video.
But basically, I just want to talk through what we're going to do and a little bit more about animation
in general and specifically in.
So there's a misconception, I think, in animation that, you know, there are limits to where things
can go and everything works nicely together.
And what I mean is, like, if this, you know, we're going to do a bouncing ball, that this won't
go through the floor, that somehow we're going to simulate this or something like that.
And so there are these boundaries that, you know, the ball can't go through.
That's totally not true.
That is not true at all.
And you as the animator have to be the one to precisely place everything.
Right.
So so this can go straight through the floor.
Right.
I can just move anything, anywhere I want to.
There's, you know, no respect to those boundaries.
So it's all up to us, right?
Every frame where we are going to be responsible for.
OK, so let's dive into this.
And with that responsibility, start animating this ball.
So we have this generic ball here.
It's labeled generic ball.
In the outliner.
We can see it has some translation here where it's above the ground a little bit.
So I've created this set so that we can all kind of start from the same place.
I'm going to turn off this grid because we already have a floor here and I have a. aliasing on.
So everything looks a little nice and smooth.
Going to get rid of this outliner because I want more screen space here.
So when we're animating, we have the timeline.
And right now nothing is animated.
So nothing's happening when we're scrubbing it.
But so let's animate this thing a little bit.
Let's take this and put it on top using the manipulator here.
I have w pressed on the keyboard so I have the manipulator tool available to me.
So like I said earlier, we're going to be responsible for placing this thing exactly where we want
it.
And for this first lesson and exercise, I don't want you to worry about rotation, OK?
Even though we can kind of see the ball here, totally ignore this rotation.
And in fact, if this wireframe is kind of distracting to you, let's go to show and we can actually
turn off selection highlighting so you don't see that wireframe view.
So now we can definitely just focus on the position of the ball and not worry about the rotation, because
we want to start, you know, and build up to other aspects, just like translation rotation and all
the way up to animated character.
So what this ball up here, we want to set our first key so we can do that in several ways.
Most animators just use the shortcut s on the keyboard.
And as I do that, you can see there's a result 10.
That means there are ten things that were keyed.
And if we look over here in the channel box, we can see all ten.
We place the key on every attribute that is in the channel box and that might be fine.
That might be what you want to do.
Or in our case, we know we're just going to be working on the translation right now.
So I'm just going to hit undo a couple of times to get rid of that key frame.
And we can see that little timeline tick.
Got a race down here that was that little red mark.
So if I just want to ke the translations, I can hit shift w and this makes sense because we know W
is the manipulator tool.
E is the rotation tool.
So you guessed it, if we hit shift E, it'll only key the rotations.
But for us let's just do the translations for now.
So we have our first key.
Let's move to somewhere in the timeline, maybe ten frames and let's put this on the ground here on
the floor.
It's going to move this some distance out here and place it on the floor and it to frame up on it so
I can kind of get a better look at the floor and now I want it to bounce.
So I'm going to maybe move, let's say, five frames.
We can change all this timing later.
It's going to move this up here somewhere.
I'm going to move this back down onto the floor.
So I'm going to reduce the timeline here so we can watch just the what we've animated here and we're
animating in 24 frames a second, which is dropped on over here, that you can change the frame rate.
Every film that you've ever watched is going to be in 24 frames a second unless it's Peter Jackson,
some crazy 48 frames per second thing.
So nine times out of ten, you're going to be animating in twenty four frames a second.
So you can just kind of not worry about ever changing that for the time being.
So for us to playback our animation, we can scrub the timeline.
We can also hit the play button over here and watch it animate through.
Right now it doesn't look super compelling and we're going to of course, refine this to make it look
a lot better.
But we're also just still getting familiar with the tools while we're still learning about animation.
So we're doing two things at once here.
And so we're just going to take our time with that.
So we have the animation done, cityscape to stop playback.
And the shortcut for playing back is also V.
I use this all the time, so I have my left hand on the keyboard, on my right hand, on the mouse so
I can always hit Alvie or escape to stop it and kind of see what I've been doing.
I'm also going to turn on the ambient occlusion just for right now so we can see the actual kind of
contact with the ground.
That's a little hard to make out now with the same everything being the same color here.
So now we can kind of see we have this ball that bounces, but the first thing you notice is it just
kind of starts immediately.
And one thing to know about animation is that it takes a person at least six frames to register something
from the cut, basically.
So we never want to start animating anything from the first frame unless we're intentionally breaking
that kind of a rule that we've established.
So we want to move all the animation over six frames.
How do we do that?
Let's shift click in the timeline and drag.
And now we get this kind of red kind of bar here and you see these little yellow arrows here.
There's one over here that's kind of hidden and there's one here at the end of the selection that's
scales all of the key frames.
You don't want to do that.
And also you'll notice that as we scale, it doesn't respect the individual frames.
So we're we're putting things, putting the keys on like half frames.
So to fix that, you can go right click and go down to snap and it'll snap the key frame to a full frame.
But what we want to do is move everything.
So I'm going to create that selection again by holding down shift and clicking everything.
I'm going to click in the middle to arrows here and then I can just slide everything over six frames.
So now we playback hitting Albe.
We can see we can kind of register, OK, there's a ball on a cliff and then it starts bouncing and
falls to the ground.
So in the next lesson, we're going to actually refine the animation and learn more about what it takes
to make something believable as far as animating it is concerned.
So thanks for watching and I'll see in the next lesson.