Bouncing ball - Graph editor

To learn about the graph editor, tangents and linear movements, we were tasked with creating a realistic ball bounce animation.

The first step was to make the ball, which is just a sphere.

I pulled it up to around 25 units above the 'ground' then went about animating.

I moved it up and down, adding key frames and reducing the return height each time to try and get a realistic reduction in height each time.

At this point the graph editor looked like this:

And the animation looke likethis:

Quite unrealistic movement, though the height and timing look to be okay.

The next step was to improve the animation. As standard, Maya adds both decelaration and acceleration curves onto animation movement. I knew we needed some fast deceleration on the bounce, so I switched all the bottom curves to Linear.

This is the resulting graph editor:

And the animation:

A definite improvement, but it can be improved further!

There needs to be a longer platau on the up stroke and steeper accelaration/decelaration on the bottom of the curve.

To achieve this, I used the 'break tangents' option on the bottom curves to allow more freedom with editing.

Then individually edited the tangent lines for longer platau and steeper down strokes.

Here is the final graph editor:

The final animation timings:

And the final animation video:

As you can see, the movement is way more realistic than how it started. I feel I have learned a lot about the graph editor from this exercise and it will become very useful when animating the project models later.