[flow_default] Transcription: 02-09-Polishing the bouncing ball.json

transcriptions/02-09-Polishing the bouncing ball.json

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+{
+  "audio_file": "02-09-Polishing the bouncing ball.wav",
+  "text": "The time has come to give the final touch to our bouncing ball animation. To clearly understand what we need to modify, I will change the frame rate of the animation by going into the document option frame rate. Here we can find a bunch of presets that will set the pace of our animation. We are currently using the classic 24 frames per second, but I generally use 30 frames per second. Here I will select a custom frame rate and I will set it to 5 frames per second. Now when I play my animation, it kind of plays in slow motion. It's a good way to identify the different positions of the bouncing ball. And it can be a method to spot spacing troubles. Switching back to 24 frames per second, I will select the object and go into the motion path panel. I will set the animation range from 0 to 24 frames per second. And since this is a function I use a lot, I will right click on the calculate button and add it to my quick favorit. This way, when I press the Q key, I can access the calculate function anywhere in the 3D viewport. You can now study our spacing and try to see what's wrong with our animation. When an object is falling in space, it's accelerating until it touches the ground. The speed of an object might stabilize due to air friction, but unless there is a force pulling our ball up, it's supposed to accelerate until it touches the ground. So the spacing should be increasing from one frame to the other while it's falling. And we can see this is what's happening on those frames. Each frame forward, the spacing is getting bigger. On the last frame, the spacing is getting smaller. It means that the ball is slowing down before hitting the curve. To make things even clearer, let's get rid of our two breakdown keyframes by selecting them and pressing the X key. I've also switched back to Bezier, both handles. When I play the animation, you will better feel this is in and is out. You can see the ball accelerating when it's leaving the ground and before it hits the ground. While if I switch both handles to vector now we can feel that the ball is bouncing. To get even a better feeling I will also slightly raise the curve by moving both vector handles towards the outside. And by scaling the upper key I will make the ball raising faster and holding a bit more in the air. I have bring more contrast into my animation by changing the shape of the curve and now it's more stylized. A little touch we can add to make it even more appealing is to slightly offset the upper key of one frame. This way we don't have the same timing when the ball is rising than when it's falling down. We can recalculate the motion path of our animation by clicking the update path button and instead of the in range option I've switched to around frame. From there I can choose all many frames I want to see on my motion path before and after the current position of the ball. Now when I look at the spacing of my ball we can see that when it's leaving the ground it has the biggest spacing and it's slowing down when reaching the highest position which is correct. When the ball is falling down we also get a proper spacing. It's getting bigger and bigger as we approach the contacting keeper. We now have a pretty cool bouncing rhythm so let's work a bit on the scaling of our ball or more precisely on its squashing and stretching. Pressing out edge in the graph editor will reveal all the curves. I can hide the Z location curve so that we focus on the scale curves. Since our ball squashing is pretty brutal, we can switch those keyframes to vector. If we had a very slow squashing, we would have kept them as it is, as the ball would be progressively absorbing the impact through its squash. Throbbing through the animation, I'm trying to get a feeling of the motion of the ball. When the ball squash, we can imagine it's a continuity of its fall. And since we are working on the cycling animation, the latest frame is the same as the first. So if I check the frame before the latest, I can see that I have a big spacing between the pace of my ball and the ground. So it would be better if I kept this dynamism through the spacing of the squashing, meaning that I will offset the squash pose of frame two on frame one, and we will have a very stretched pose on frame zero and the very squashed one on frame one. And so it will transition with the fall better. We are now getting a more impactful squashing if we compared with previous version. But since we have offsetted one frame for the squashing, we should do the same for the stretching. As you can see my spacing between frame 3 and 4 is very small. So I want a faster animation. I will offset the keys one frame before and I will also switch them to vector. Next is the air squashing. I offset the keyframe where the ball recovers its round shape and then it's getting squashed again with the inner star when it's reached the highest point. Since the highest point is on frame 15, I will make it squash on frame 15. I'd like to slightly delay the squashing so what I will do is that I will duplicate all the keys on frame 8 and offset them onto frame 10 or 11. It makes all the scale curve becoming fat, which means that from frame 8 to frame 11, the ball is perfectly round. And as the ball will be accelerating to get back to the ground, I'd like to slightly offset the time it starts to stretch by 2 frames, because the ball is falling faster than it is raising, so making it stretching a little sooner does make sense. Animating is not a linear art. You will need to go back and forth a lot of time. And while the animation gets more opinion, I feel like there is something a little off. And since we've been offsetting a lot of curve, the ball is starting to relax while it hasn't left the ground. Meaning that the ball shouldn't be in air on frame four. So I just need to re-edit the curve for the Z location and offset the starting point by one frame. And now when I play again my animation, I feel like there is something a bit off on the air squashing. The ball slows and then it starts squashing. And if we double check the spacing of the pace of the ball, we can see that as soon as it starts squashing, the easing gets stronger and that's a bit weird. The yellow arrows are getting smaller progressively while there is a big difference between the two red arrows. So even if it's very subtle, it makes the animation a bit weird. So again, I can fix this by simply offsetting the squashing keyframes, the plateau we have created before, just by one frame, making it happening a little sooner so that it will better blend while it's raising. is that I set the shortcut onto the overlay. You can assign a shortcut to any tool or option in Blender by simply right clicking on it and selecting assign shortcut. I've personally used the shortcut power 2 which is just upon the tab key on my French keyboard. I'm pretty happy with this Bonesing Ball animation. To summarize, we have seen that curve editing can dramatically change our animation. Good blocking makes your animation a little better when you switch to spline. It's important not to be afraid to break the curve using vector handles. Offsetting a key by one frame can really change your animation and make it look better or destroy. Don't forget that the devil is in the details.",
+  "language": "en",
+  "confidence": null,
+  "duration": 577.94
+}