Our final animation of the assignment was animating the basket ball jump with the ball bouncing mechanics from the first exercise. After the last push animation I really didnt want to try cutting any corners or not use my references properly. I decided that even though the tutorial provided by Mike was in Blender for the 3D animators, that shouldn't stop me from watching it as it was a really good reference tool for getting an idea of the timing and spacing even if I was doing it in Toon Boom. So I stuck to the references provided in the lecture brief; Mikes Tutorial + Final Render along with the basketball jump shoot tutorial.
This time I wasn't going to just do my key poses, breakdowns then wing the timing like I had been doing before. This time I was going to do my key poses, space them on the timeline for their timing, find the right frames then do the breakdowns, tween, then fix the inbetweens, and finally animate the ball last.
As usual I got the keyposes and breakdowns ready. Actually spacing them out on the timeline to get the timing down early on was already helping my brain figure things out already.
From here it was just using the tweening on Toon Boom and going and and seeing how things flowed, rearranging a few things and then trying to exaggerate or offset a few different things like arms, legs or the head. I tried to keep his jump as close to the jump shoot reference but then added the same exaggerated squash from Mikes example before coming back up. I could've definately worked on the timing a bit at the end to have him sit longer during the squash down to really emphasise the weight of landing back on the feet before coming back up.
Once I was happy enough though I added in the ball. Using the red marker guide in the above video I worked out the kind of arc I wanted the ball to follow and used the timing of the hands to figure out the kind of spacing the frames of my ball bounce should have. Like the inbetweening it was a bit of trial and error with the ball just trying to get it to look right but I think overall I got a good sense of squash and stretch in my ball.
Reflecting back on the animation I think its much better than the pushing body mechanics exercise. I've learnt my lesson that following references is key to getting a strong sense of timing, anticipation, arcs, etc. Of course there are things that could be worked on with this animation, the ball in particular. I found it quite hard to keep it on track with the model. I think I seen in a tutorial on youtube, you should make two balls, one attatched to the hand and another seperate but because I didn't know how the rig worked with Toon Booms nodes I didn't want to waste a few hours trying to work that out so I hand placed the ball in the frames to try and get it to follow the movement of the hands as best as I could. I think you can tell the motivation to keep up with all the animations this week slowly started to die with these last two but I did my best to push through it to try and use all the different techniques while learning the new software.
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