Assignment 2

Documentation:

This is the baseline assignment for the class, so I generated the bouncing ball using Maya and Quicktime Pro. I will put up exactly what I did in the recipe part, but for this section I'll generally say how I made the ball. In maya, I put the camera on the front view and made a box for the background. I then made a sphere, and textured it with a tennis ball texture. Then I put it generally in the corner of the screen and started to animate it. I'll put up exactly how I animated it in the recipe part. The first pass didn't look that good, so I went in and made the roll take longer and fixed all of the bounces using the graph editor in Maya. After it was finished, I added a blinn texture to the background and colored it white. I went into the render settings and used a batch render to generate the 96 images that I could import into Quicktime to make the animation. In Quicktime I imported the files and the program put them together for me. Then I exported it as a .mov file and put it up here on the blog.

Recipe:



First I opened Maya. Using the tab button, the main menu came back, and I arrowed up until I got to Maya. I pressed enter to start the program.




In Maya, go to Create > Polygon Primitives > Cube. The cube I created was height of 50, depth of 1, and width of 100. Then I made the tennis ball. The same way as the cube, I went to Create > Polygon Primitives > Sphere. I made a ball with radius of 25, with height and width divisions of 20 each. Made a simple tennis ball texture in Photoshop. Just making a small picture with a green background and a white 8 on it. To add the texture, right click and hold down on the selected object, then go down to the bottom where you see Assign New Material. There you can pick the color or texture you want. I decided to make them blinn textures. Where it says Color, click on the little arrow and choose texture for the tennis ball. Then you can add the tennis ball texture to the ball.



Now, I hit the space bar and right clicked to bring up the perspectives menu. From there I changed the screen layout to front. From there I moved the ball up to the top right part of my view.

Then I started to animate it. Select the ball at frame 1 and hit "s" to make that's the ball's position at frame 1. Then move the slider to frame 6. Select the ball and move it down and to the left until it touches the bottom of the background.

Hit "s" again to set the ball at frame 6. At this point, you can press the key button at the bottom near the script editor. That will set the auto key on so that you don't have to press "s" everytime you want to set a frame. I also hit the button next to it that looks like a guy running. Those are the settings, and I always do my animations 24 frames a second, and make sure the playback is at 24 frames a second. Here at the bottom I can also add the swash. On frame 5, hit "s" to set the position. On frame 6 when the ball touches, use the scale tool to swash it in the up-down direction. Then move to frame 7, you can do the opposite and stretch it with the scale. Then on frame 8 the ball goes back to normal. This is the bottom of the bounce, so now the ball will come back up again.

Move the time slider to frame 13, and move the ball to about half the height of the original bounce. This is the top of the arc. For the bottom I do the same process of moving it down and having it squash and stretch. In the end I have 5 bounces, each one diminishing in height by half. Each ball to the top of its arc is about 6 frames, though I will change it later in the graph editor.



Then I get to the end where the ball hits the wall. From there I have the ball roll for a little while and settle. On frame 58 the ball is on the ground again, and I have it roll until frame 78. The ball then rolls back and settles until frame 96.

I also rotate the ball 110 degrees rolling forward and -60 degrees backwards to make the ball actually look like it's rolling. Once I get my initial keys in, I polish the animation using the graph editor. To get the to the graph editor, go Window > Animation Editors > Graph Editor. Once that's pulled up, I go into the Translate Y on the left hand side. The Y direction is my default up in my Maya. To make the ball feel like it hits the ground harder, select the key (or the black dot) where the ball hits the ground. Then click on the "linear tangents" button, and it will straighten the Translate Y out for you, so the ball only hits the ground on one frame. I do this for all of the bounces. Here in the graph editor I make sure I don't have any keys out of frame, and then I'm going to render the frames.

To render out the frames, I go to the little clap boards at the top of the screen and go to the settings. I make sure they are saved as .jpeg images, and the name of the frames are name#.ext so I will have for example TessBall1.jpeg for use in Quicktime. I do the frame range as 1-96, and then it's ready to render. I make sure I'm in the rendering dropdown menu at the top of the page, then go to Render > Batch Render. This will render out the 96 files in a folder that you choose.

When it's done rendering, I launch Quicktime Pro. I press tab to open the main menu, and use the arrow keys to find Quicktime. I press enter to launch it. In quicktime, I alt + tab and the arrow keys to get to the file menu. I go File > Open Image Sequence. Then I navigate the folders to find where the images are stored. They should be something like TessBouncingBall1 through 96. Quicktime assembles the frames for you in order. Then I go to File > Export then hit enter. I saved the movie as a Quicktime Movie, and when I exported it All I had to do was upload it to the blogger site.