Bouncing Ball off a wall - a Matthew Finch Tutorial

Its time to go back to basics, and bounce some balls. This time around were going to roll a ball off a high ledge, bounce it off a wall, and have it come to a settle. 

The idea of this assignment is to help polish some of your fundamentals. The energy picks up as the ball rolls off the ledge, it further picks up as it falls from the ledge to the floor. Its energy slowly is lost as it moves forward, the energy then bounces off the wall and continues to travel until it is all gone. And of course the energy of each bounce slowly is lost as well. 

Helpful Hints. I have attached 3 sample files that show the workflow I chose to use for this particular assignment. 

Notice first I work out the timing of the ball progressing forward. I have attached an image of how I did this in the graph.

Then I work out the bounces. I actually chose to mute the translation forward after I animated and just focus on each bounce as seemed appropriate. Again, this is how it looks in the graph editor.

   

 Put it together and... This example took about 10 minutes to animate. Since it is such a simple assignment, why not challenge yourself!

Here's an example of some rules to play with, the ball must roll a high ledge, bounce off a wall, and have come to a settle. You can try this with a few different balls. Heavy balls, light balls, bowling balls, ping pongs, basketballs, tennis balls etc. Take it a step further, add some subtle squash and stretch. Add some rotations. Experiment with the layout. 

Most importantly learn from this exercise! For those of you that don't like working in the graph editor and using motion trails, why not implement that into this challenge?

Also, there is plenty more information around the web on how to animate a bouncing ball, including the simple physics. I greatly encourage you to look.

Have fun and happy animating!