Keyframe Animation—Bouncing a Ball

No matter where you study animation, you’ll always find the classic animation exercise of creating a bouncing ball. Although it’s a straightforward exercise and you’ve probably seen it a hundred times on the Web and in other books, the bouncing ball is a perfect exercise with which to begin animating. You can imbue the ball with so much character that the possibilities are almost endless, so try to run this exercise as many times as you can handle. You’ll improve with every attempt.

Animating a bouncing ball is a good exercise in real-world physical motion as well as in cartoon movement. First, you’ll create a rubber ball and create a proper animation hierarchy for it. Then, you’ll add cartoonish movement to ...

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