Bouncing Ball Animation Tutorial

Learning how to animate a bouncing ball is a great way to develop your animation skills. This particular animation test teaches you how to implement four important animation principles; arcs, timing, spacing, and squash and stretch into your animations.

In this animation tutorial, I will show you how to use the animation principles of timing, spacing, squash and stretch in your bouncing ball animation.

Bouncing Ball Animation Pack

Bouncing ball animation tutorial pack

Bouncing Ball Animation Tutorial

bouncing ball part 1

You will need to open up your Toon Boom animation program, and title the project the bouncing ball animation. I recommend setting your frame rate at 24 frames per second, and your resolution at 1280 by 720. Go to window. Scroll down and select the timeline button.

You will need to create five layers for this project. So click on the green button in the timeline button, in order to create the layers. The layers that you will create will be named arcs, timing, spacing, background line, and final animation.

Placeholder 3

First of all when you are creating a bouncing ball you should always draw the arcs. You see every motion tends to follow an arc or circular path. So in your bouncing ball animation, you will need to draw four arcs. However make sure that each arc that you draw becomes shorter and shorter as draw towards the right side of your project. This is because the first bounce of a ball is usually the highest.

After the first bounce, the next bounces will become shorter and shorter because the momentum will start to decrease. You will also need to draw a straight line because a ball will not usually come to a complete stop. Instead the ball will keep rolling for a while, until friction begins to slow down the ball.

bouncing ball timing

After you having finished drawing you arcs, it is now time to time out your bouncing ball animation. I decided to set the timing for this animation to be 7 seconds in total. Since we are animating at 24 frames per second.

You have the option to either animate the bouncing ball on one's (every frame is unique) or two's (you repeat an image twice). I choose to use 2's because it is faster, and your animation will still look smooth.

bouncing ball- spacing

The third step is to set the spacing for this animation. If you want to slow down/slow in an animation, you will need to draw a lot of drawings that are spaced closely to each other. If you want to increase/ slow out, you will need to draw a few drawings that spaced farther apart.

I decided to slow in the top of the arcs, and the bottom of the arcs. Then on the sides of the arcs, I decided to use the slow out spacing. This will help the bouncing ball animation to appear like the numerous bouncing ball tests that you can see on Youtube.

Squash and Stretch Example
The fourth and final step in animating a bouncing ball is to add squash and stretch. You usually squash/ compress an object when gravity is pushing against it, and you stretch an object when the object gains momentum.

It is important that you make sure you only change the shapes, but retain the volume. I applied this concept to the bouncing ball animation. If you want to see this example in action, I recommend that you watch the video included in this article.

Conclusion

Congratulations on completing the bouncing ball animation. In conclusion, I hope that you learned how to implement arcs, timing, spacing, and squash and stretch not only in this bouncing ball animation, but in all your future animations.

If you enjoyed this tutorial, please share this article with your friends. If you have any questions about the tutorial, you can message me through my contact page.

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