Ball Drop

What did you learn?

For this project I learned how to animate from footage. This project required a lot of work in aftereffects, google docs/word and Maya. For this project I had to take the footage into aftereffects, which was new for me. I had to track every time the ball hit, the frame, and how far it bounced back up.  Google docs was used to keep track of all of this information. I had to do this process for each individual ball. This was a little time consuming but was fairly simple. After this was done I was ready to start creating in Maya. After I created each individual ball I had to find textures, bump maps and color maps. The golf ball bump map was easy to apply. The bump map and color map for the tennis ball was a little confusing at first but overall worked out as soon as I figured out which channel to put them in. For the holes in the bowling ball I had to create cylinders and bolenes-subtract. This was really simple, and its one of the first things I learned how to do in Maya. The process of actually animating them was a little frustrating because it was so time consuming and I did not know how to do it. I had to create all linear curves which was very confusing for the first time. After doing this fro each ball I had to create a background. I just created a cube and deleted 2 of the faces to make it simple. Then it was time for lighting this was really easy because it the animation does not rotate. I then took it into aftereffects and finished the animation. All I had to do in aftereffects was render it and make it a jpeg. This project was not as simple as I expected and very time consuming.