Week 3... pfff!

Ok, so, here's my early entry for this week. I got an early revision form my mentor Don, so even better to complete this post.

Geez! So, that was a hard week, and the hardest part is: Its not even the hard part yet!
Mainly, we were asked to animate a bouncing ball with the weight of a basket ball or similar and a pose showing excitement, along, of course, with both the planning and the sketches.

The bouncing ball was hard, even though I've animated some thing before, now in AM its really going back to the basics and start from there, get it right and understand, I think that's an amazing method, because before I just had to kinda learn-what-was-happening, kinda animate kinda get-it-done-NOW! So going into the basics like this has been really helpful, there's so much to understand and to really acknowledge, before you even think about animation something as "Simple" ( ejem...not simple at all) as a ball. It can get a bit overwhelming, because you really want to just get it done and have it look amazing but... well not yet.

With the bouncing ball, there are so many things to keep in mind!
Spacing, sense of weight, timing, residual bounces...pweff!
First thing to note is that the height right after the bounce (Contact) should be slightly lower than the one previous to the bounce, and go forth keeping that in mind, also having it bounce each time, at least half of the previous height.

The thing I got most REALLY MOST trouble with, was making the residual bounces and the tiny comeback/rollback/translate back thing on the ball at the end, because right now it just comes to an abrupt stop and that does not work at all...
I need to work on that and figure, but mostly, understand how that works in the curves, because I get such a messy result every time I try to fix it....

So, here´s how both my pose and bouncing ball came out, please fell free to give any feedback!

http://vimeo.com/35473375

Cheers!!