Wednesday 25th September 2013

Squash and Stretch

For the exercise we needed to make an example of squash and stretch.

Before we created our own animations we were given a demonstration on how to do a bouncy ball animation. This was done by creating tweens and then also use an option called ease which allows you to adjust the pacing of the tween. We was also shown the timing of the animation as well the exaggeration of the squash. The timing is key in the animation as if it sticks to the ground for too long it won't act like a bouncy ball, however the same can apply if you leave no time for the ball to hit the floor as it won't have much opportunity to squash.

I created my bouncy ball animation and used the same techniques as shown in the demonstration. I created my ball using the oval tool and gradient transform tool. The gradient transform tool allows me to repostion my gradient to give the ball a bit of a 3D look.

I then went on to animated the ball using tweens. I made a keyframe at frame 13 and position the ball directly below the starting point. I then converted the frames into a classic tween and adjusted the ease. The ease I wanted was to have the ball slower at the start and then to gain momentum as it nears the floor, so I needed to set the ease at -100 to get this effect.

The top image shows the animation at an ease of -100 whilst the lower image shows the animation without ease. In the lower image you can see how each frame is evenly seperated whereas compared too the image above the frames start close together and then start to space out a little bit. This creates the effect that the ball is gaining momentum as it appears to get faster the closer it gets towards the ground.

 

Once the tween was finished I needed to then add the squash effect. I added another key frame at 14 and 16. These frames are the squashing phase of the animation. For frame 14 I positioned the ball slightly lower than frame 13 and used the transformation tool to alter the shape into an oval. This is going to be the start of the squashing animation, frame 16 has the end of the squash. For the final part of the squash I once again used the transformation tool and altered the shape of the ball, but this time I slightly exaggerated the shape into an almost flat ball. This shape of the ball will only last for the one frame so it won't be too noticable but it will give a bit of life to the animation. I then added a tween to combine frames 14 to 16. This tweens ease was left at 0 as it did not need altering.

This image shows the stages of the squash effect in the animation.

As it was just an animation of a ball bouncing I copied the frames 1 to 15 that I had just made and pasted them onto the timeline again. I then reversed the frames and adjusted the pasted tweens ease to +100. This is because I wanted the same effect that the ball is faster the closer to the ground it is. However, since the ball is now leaving the ground and going up into the air the ball needs to start slowing down the further away from the ground it gets.

This shows the timeline of my animation.