Critiquing Ball with Tail planning and blocking & Ball with Tail animation in spline exercise
Tailed ball animation in blocking feedback
Blocking animation submission on SyncSketch: Tailed ball -> fox jumping01
First of all, I overthought things and got it completely wrong by ignoring everything I had learned about animating the bouncing ball. Keep it simple, stupid!
Regarding the Bouncing Ball
I came across a blog, a tutorial, and other people’s animations, and I learned that when you jump (like an athlete), the path you’re creating in the Y-coordinate space—which describes your height—is not a perfect parabola. This is because of the friction that affects your body as it moves through the air. While this is true, I exaggerated it too much.
In reality, the path still follows a parabola, representing an organic movement with ease-in and ease-out. It may slightly deviate, becoming more pronounced on the left side of the curve, but it still represents the pathway from the floor to the highest point of the jump, where the body momentarily stays in the air before it begins to fall.
Regarding the Blocking
The blocking confused me when I initially planned the animation. I sketched out triangular motion trails for the jumps, but it should have been a parabola!
Fair enough—when Maya is set to linear tangent interpolation and the trail option is displayed, it shows these triangular shapes. However, this isn’t mechanical; it’s an organic motion, so the path should still resemble a parabola.
Regarding the Tail
The tail should follow a similar trajectory to the ball, much like the roller coaster example where the ball is the front carriage and the subsequent parts of the tail are the carriages that follow. My first attempt resulted in a stiff tail, which is the opposite of the desired fluid appearance.
Tailed ball animation in spline exercise
Redoing blocking
To achieve fluidity in the movement of the tail and eliminate stiffness, I began to redo the blocking stage, in reference to the feedback given. I drew the table that depicted the breakdown of 1 jump into 10 keyframes, to better navigate the following movement of the tail. I used that as the reference point, to check against while animating.
This is a screenshot of the work-in-progress during the blocking stage. The motion trail in the viewport currently has a triangular shape, which is typical for this stage. Moving forward to the spline animation phase, my role will be to refine the pathways to better approximate organic movement by reshaping them into parabolas. To achieve this, I will add more keyframes, providing Maya with additional data to create smoother parabolic interpolations. This approach addresses the default linear interpolation caused by the limited coordinate space data provided during the blocking stage.
Delivering spline animation
Delivering an animation in spline requires working within the graph editor and the viewport to adjust the interpolation curves, ensuring they approximate organic movement while checking the outcome for both appearance and feel.
The automated spline interpolation function facilitates the transition from linear tangents to spline curves. However, due to the limited sample data provided, this often results in visual artifacts. Therefore, manual corrections are necessary to refine the animation.
Spline animation submission on SyncSketch: Tailed ball spline -> fox_jumps_spline_1