AD. Animation - Exercises

MODULE GCD 61604: Advanced Animation 

Tristan Vaughan Sleep - 0365120

Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media

Advanced Animation - Exercises

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MODULE INSTRUCTIONS:

“SEPT 2025: GCD 61604 / ADVANCED MODULE INFORMATION BOOKLET”

Exercises: Bouncing Ball Animation (Weighted 10%)

Exercises - Bouncing Ball: For this module, Students of the cohort are tasked with creating a series of smooth & realistic animation of bouncing balls by using the provided ball rig. The main goal of this exercise is for students to explore timing, spacing, arcs and other physical properties to showcase the unique characteristics of each type of ball. The outcome of this exercise is for the students to produce a video/videos of various bouncing balls which will be recorded in 1280 x 720p at 24fps and should be uploaded to their personal E-portfolio.

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PARTICIPATED LECTURES:

WEEK I - II: Introductions to Blender Animation + Bouncing Ball

Introduction to Blender + Animation: Following the cohort’s brief introduction into the module and the lecturer covering the projects and expectations, students would also be briefed on the 3D software Blender and its controls. The lecture would mainly show students how to move around the workspace, manage viewports & timelines, placing/altering meshes into said workspace and, how to create keyframes. With prior experience, this introduction functioned as a healthy refresher to the software and had taught me of valuable shortcuts especially when dealing with animation:

Animation timeline: The Animation timeline is a viewport which allows for the manual animating of the Blender environment using keyframes, tweens etc. This can be accessed by either using cmd + F12 or can be swapped in the top-left of any viewport. In addition to this, the timeline has an additional feature where it can represent an animation using graphs - each line referencing aspects of the model such as translation, rotation or scale in three directions.

Frames: Identical to their 2D counter-parts, Frames are alterations to the model’s shape, positioning or alignment to create animations in Blender. In the menu, you can choose what type of frame you want to add such as key frames, breakdowns, holds, extreme or, jitter which each have their own colours and can be toggled individually. Furthermore, this keeps the timeline easy to read and understand.

Exercise I: To begin the module, students are returning to the basics and are tasked with creating an animation of a bouncing ball where they will need to consider concepts such as timings, spacing arcs etc. In addition, this exercise should also get the students to become more familiar with Blender and how to animate within the software. To help the students, the lecturer has provided them with an already created + rigged model of a ball with alternate shapes and external controls to make animation easier. The Rigged Ball uses a series of external controls being a translation ring which allows for the movement of the ball, the rotation ring which allows for the ball to spin independently of its movement and a squash and stretch rig which automatically distorts the ball’s shape. With the provided model and a series of reference videos, students are expected to create a series of animations based on balls with different properties.

“Animation of bouncing Ping-Pong Ball”

Ping-Pong Ball: The first ball we were recommended to experiment with and animate was a standard ping-pong ball which would need to bounce multiple times across the scene. When looking into the reference video, it becomes clear that the ping-pong ball was a good starting point as the ball had an easy to follow arc and simpler to animate. This is because ping-pong balls have quick and elastic bounces/rebounds without distorting (squash and stretch) due to the balls being made of plastic. Despite its simplicity, it was a good exercise in learning the animation timeline, getting a sense of spacing + timing and understanding what aspects of the design make the ball unique.

“Animation of bouncing Football Ball”

Football/Basketball: The second ball I had chosen to experiment with and animate was the Football as not only would it be similar to the first but, it would also feature the use of squash and stretch. Starting with the reference video, the first immediate change would need to be the weight and elasticity of the ball which would be determined by arc heights and timing. For example, the Ping-Pong Ball had longer (in time) bounces where the ball bounces higher: the football being perceived as heavier would need a smaller arc in less time. Once I had animated the path of the football, I began adding squash and stretching to give the ball a more ‘animated’ feel which can be seen when the ball falls or it makes contact with the floor.

“Animation of bouncing Bowling Ball”

Bowling Ball: The third ball was a bit of a unique thing to experiment with and create an animation for given that it is a bowling ball - rigid in shape and very heavy. The animation process was similar to that of the Ping-Pong in the sense it was mainly mapping out arcs with no squash and stretch with the only difference being that the bowling ball had almost no bounces and would hit the floor at a greater speed. To make the animation a little more unique, I also experimented with playing with the camera in the animation - making it shake when the bowling ball landed. The more violent shake can be seen on first contact and subsequent shakes become less violent, simulating the ball losing kinetic energy. While simple, this one does demonstrate how other aspects of the animation can sell the illusion of realistic motion.

“Animation of bouncing Beach Ball Ball”

Beach ball: the final ball we would need to animate is the beach ball which would function similarly to that of the football with its squash and stretch. However, the beach ball had the added effect of being very lightweight which would be seen in this animation being longer due to the slower falling of the ball. In addition, the squash and stretch is also a bit more unique as the beach ball only distorts when it makes contact with the floor where the football had the added stretch when falling. Another change I would make to the beach ball is adding a ‘ripple’ effect when the ball bounces - I added a subsequent squash and stretch after the ball hit the floor to give it an airy, rubbery feel to it. 

WEEK IV - VI: Introduction to bone animations + Swinging Pendulum

Bone Animations + Effects: For the next exercises, students would be given three different pendulum modules which would teach us about how to animate more complex models by using their built-in bone systems. In addition to this, the models would teach us about the application of effects which can create simplified animation. For this first lesson in this task, Students would learn about how to set up, change the appearance, and ultimately animate the bones of a model. 

When setting up bones in unique shaped models, you can insert new bones and connect them in a chain to make a skeleton system. With the bones paired to the model, you will need to determine how much each bone influences the model - also known as weight-painting. Ratings from blue to red determine how much a mesh is influenced by the bones and its alterations. For the second part of the lesson, the lecturer informed us of applying effects to your models - in this case more specifically to the bones which can make animating easier. In the instance of the pendulum, the effect applied to the bones is to tie their rotation to their parent bone which mimics its motion, making the pendulum swing look more realistic. While we were free to experiment with it, it was recommended that we should animate the pendulum bone by bone rather than using the shortcut.

Pendulum Animations: for the main requirement of the exercise, students would be given three separate models of pendulum, like objects and would need to animate them in accordance with their appearance and physical attributes. For example, the first pendulum is more light-weight and plastic in appearance and should have a more exaggerated swing while the second pendulum is made from metal and should have difficulty in reaching greater heights. For this process, students would need to animate all three and experiment without using the effects panel and learning about timings + follow-through animation.

In general, when it came to animating this project, the main goal was to experiment with follow-through animation or the idea that the motion continues after the object has stopped moving. This can mainly be seen in my animations once the main platform has stopped moving and the pendulum carries the motion onwards before returning to the center. The amount that the pendulum continues swinging is dependent on its weight with the mace-like pendulum moving much slower and requiring a greater force to have follow-through animations.

“Animation of Plastic-learning pendulum.”

“Animation of Mace Pendulum”

“Animation of Alien ship Pendulum”

WEEK VII - IV: Emotional Posing

Model Posing + Referencing: For this final exercise, students would be tasked with producing a series of rendered images based on the poses of reference images found online. The goal of this exercise is to get students comfortable with the idea of posing a fully rigged-skeleton model as well as learning the best method for creating animations by finding reference material. For the assignment, students would need to find references for posing to communicate  feelings such as Happiness, Sadness, Fear and anger. With the references collected, students are to experiment with the lighting, framing and posing of the scene to achieve a similar effect to the original reference.

In this assignment, we were asked by the lecturer to create a short presentation which would document the creative process on how we’d chosen to model our final renders as well as look into aspects of visual design language. In general, the process would start with students collecting basic poses of people displaying the required emotion - gathering extra reference if we wanted to focus more on the expression of the characters. With the references collected, it was recommended to look at the original pose through a silhouetted view as a way to identify the shape language of the design. The idea for this is to be able to instantly recognise the pose and the feeling it's trying to communicate. In addition to this, students should also be able to break down the action lines of the scene to see where it's best to emphasise aspects of the design.

“Animated Pose: Happiness"

“Animation Pose: Sadness”

“Animated Pose: Fear.”

“Animated Pose: Anger.”

“Animated Pose: Bonus.”

In general, this project was a test in learning how to pose the main model which is expected to be used in the animation lesson following this exercise. For this exercise, I’d found the reference images on online sources such as Pinterest and had made some edits to them using Adobe Photoshop. For the action lines and detailed reference, I used modelling action figures to have a physical model to reference when posing in 3D. The only difficulty of this task was the proportions of the ‘Snow Model’ we were instructed to use for the assignment - their arms and legs were shorter to fit the exaggerated artstyle which meant that it could not be posed as accurately as the human references.