Introducing The Ball Bounce Machine!

Have you ever wondered how all those bouncing balls animations you saw were made? It seems that Maya has a secret ball bounce machine!



I began this animation some weeks ago and I've been working really slowly on it, I didn't have much time. It's the first animation I do that has a lot of objects looping and it was really fun a challanging to figure it out.

For anyone who's wondering how to make the first part, it's actually really easy. I used 3 different type of balls, a grey one, a red one and then a red one with a yellow circle around. The red balls are inside the grey box, so when a grey ball enters it stays there and I begin to animate the red ball coming out. As for the part where it adds the yellow circle, I switched off the visibility of the red ball and at the same time turned on the visibility of the last ball that already has the yellow circle parented to it. Thats how to make just 1 ball, for the rest of them, I just duplicated them 5 times and offset the keyframes.

I enjoyed animating it and I learnt a lot, I was surprised when I kept on learning stuff about a simple ball bounce! Now I'm thinking if I should add the Maya interface on the background when the ball is bouncing, so it looks as if it were recording a computer screen. As for what I'll animate next I have no idea yet, I'll think about it today.

- Jero