Maddie's Magnificent Movies!- Yet Another Bouncing Ball Animation

Our next project in Maya was to, once again, animate a bunch of balls bouncing. This, time, however, it's in 3D! 

So, in Maya, we were asked to make a golf ball, a tennis ball, and a bowling ball, and create bump maps for all of them. For the bowling ball I just used a Blinn, but for the golf and tennis balls, I found bump maps on the internet and used those. We then added 3-point lighting and a floor.

Then, we went down to a near-empty garage in the school and we bounced golf balls, tennis balls, and bowling balls in real life while filming them. Then, we put the videos into Photoshop, and we were tasked to keep track of at which frame the ball bounced up and down and the approximate height of the ball. It was time-consuming. Then, when we were done with writing all that stuff down, we went back to Maya.

In Maya, we animated the balls bouncing by placing keyframes at the exact frames the ball went up or down and then plugging in the numbers we wrote down. After that, we went to the Graph Editor for each one and made the balls' downward descent linear.

After that, we changed the material in the floor to make it match the background, and we added an image background. This was my first time using an image background, and while the shadows can be a little wonky, I'd say it looks good.

In the end, I learned how to use real life to create animations and how to keep track of which keyframes things happen at. I also learned how to use images as backgrounds in Maya.