Week 11 Lab 2

Squash and Stretch Exercise

Created a polygon sphere and grouped it twice, to form the 'translate' group and the 'rotate' group.

Renamed the two groups, switched to the 'Animation  and used the Create Deformer tool > Nonlinear > Squash. I also parented the Translate group to the squash deformer. 

Locked the all the attributes of the Translate class, except for the translate attributes.

Locked the all the attributes of the Rotate class, except for the rotate attributes.

Locked all the attributes of the polygon sphere.

Locked all the attributes of the squash deformer, except for the rotate attributes.

Locked all the attributes of the squash deformer, except for the factor attribute. Although these locking of attributes may seem simple or irrelevant, these steps are actually very crucial if you want to achieve an accurate and realistic animation.

Created a polygon plane and renamed as 'Ground', as it represents the ground that the ball is going to bounce on.

Changed the settings of the time to PAL (25 fps).

Changed the playback speed of the time slider to Real-time (25 fps).

Followed strictly to the table shown above and changed the translate attributes of the translate group of each of the key frames shown above.

The end result looks like this.

After changing the texture and the colour of the ball, I also changed the rotate attributes of the rotate group and the factor attributes of the squash deformer. I also edited the translate Y of the graph editor to give timing to the bounce of the ball.

Here is the end result of the Squash and Stretch Exercise:

In this exercise, I learnt the importance of creating multiple groups and the locking of attributes to achieve a more accurate and realistic animation. I also learnt to implement the 'Squash and Stretch' principle into my animation with the help of the squash deformer.