Original subtitles

- Let's start blocking animation

of the bouncing ball.

Here, I still have my basic interpolation.

So with all the key frames selected,

I will press T and switch to constant interpolation.

This way our ball will snap

on the different position we have previously set.

The idea is not to get disturbed by any interpolation

and focus on the timing and shapes

of our ball.

Since our animation will be cycling upon 24 frame,

the frames zero and the frame 24 will be exactly the same.

So my timing will be a bit off if I read both frame zero

and the frame 24.

So I will reduce the length of my animation

from frame zero to frame 23,

talking about Shape.

We will here now look at the squash and stretch.

If you're into animation,

I'm sure you already have heard about it.

If you look for squash and stretch ball on YouTube,

you may find this video.

I put the link in the documentation .

When the ball gets thrown at high speed on the surface,

and it touches it, it squashes.

With the power of the impact, the ball get tighter,

but it's volume has to be preserved.

So it also gets larger.

But in this case,

squashing will bring to us two information.

The power of the impact, and the softness

of the material of the ball.

Regarding our animation,

if we consider our frame zero to be the frame,

where our object will touch the ground,

we can go like one or two frame forward

and start squashing the ball by scaling it

on the Z axis down,

but also scaling it on the X and Y axis.

This way we will have some all volume preservation.

You can see here that the key frame,

hasn't been written,

as I need to enable the auto recording.

Since I haven't written any scaling key frame previously,

you can see that the ball remained flat.

I will just press ALT + S to reset the scale

on the first frame and on all the other frames.

As we have just created the scaling key frames,

they have just been added to our animation.

And so by default Lendo will switch their interpolation

to basic.

So we can see that our location is still

in step mode, but we have a scaling interpolation.

So I will select all the key frame press T

and set them to constant.

From there, we can work on the stretching of our ball.

Stretching is physically less obvious when we

are watching the tennis ball bouncing,

but it's yet still here.

So we can use stretching to input physical information

to our bouncing ball,

but we can also use it to input speed information.

If we look at the very beginning

of the video,

we can see that the ball is blurry

and it immediately translate to us some speed information.

So why the ball

is probably currently perfectly round,

the way the camera is capturing it forms some kind

of elliptic shapes.

And we have the same feeling whenever we are watching

something that goes fast.

And if we watched a right hand

of the scientist,

we can see that his fingers are also blurred

because his hand was moving very fast.

It makes his finger looks a little larger

and longer due to speed.

When an object is falling

and hitting the ground,

it is at its maximum speed just before it hit the ground.

On the frame zero,

we can input stretching information by scaling the ball up

and reducing it's scale on X and Y

to preserve its volume.

When the ball will leave the ground,

it will also be it's highest speed.

So I can duplicate frame zero and move it

on frame three or frame four.

The ball stretch, hit the ground, squash,

and stretch again when leaving the ground.

Just by looking those few frames,

we start to have the feeling of the animation

of the ball.

And this is a very important input

whenever we will be using the blocking method

is that you have to feel your animation

just through those poses.

As told before,

frame zero and frame 24 are supposed to be the same.

So I will select frame zero,

press Shift + D to duplicate it and move it on frame 20.

From frame zero to frame four the ball is

on the ground

and then it's leaving the ground from frame four

to frame 24.

Timing wise, the ball should travel upward

and downward almost evenly.

So I can offset the

up position to frame 14.

This way, we have 10 frame and moving upward

and 10 frame moving downward.

As a more subtle detailed pass,

what we can do is slightly squash the ball

whenever it reaches its top position.

This slight modification will translate the inertia

of the ball whenever it's slowing down

to its stop position.

Currently our blocking is bringing

the minimum information we need

to go to the next step.

All the extreme poses of the ball are keyed

and we have a rough timing.

For this very specific exercise,

it could be enough for me to go into spline

to go into the next step

of the animation process

but we can also input some more details

into the blocking stage

by inputting some intermediate poses or in-between.

The in-between will help us figuring out the spacing

of our ball whenever it's in the air.

Our ball is making a eight meter high jump,

so I will move it in between two, four meter

and I will clear the scaling.

Now, depending on where I will move

this key frame,

it will change the spacing of the animation.

If I move this key frame closer up to frame four

where it takes off, our spacing will be larger

in the beginning of the jump than it is

whenever it's reaching the highest point

meaning that on frame seven,

the ball will go faster than on frame 10,

which is what we want because the ball

is leaving the ground at full speed.

So it will reach its mid-air position before frame nine.

And when falling down it will be at full speed on frame 24.

So it should be mid-air, closer to frame 24,

than frame 14.

I know spacing can be a bit complicated when you

are on the blocking stage

and it will be way more obvious

in the next video.

To summarize, during the blocking stage,

we key frame the extreme poses,

we make a rough timing paths,

we can use breakdowns and

in-between to input more spacing and timing informations.

We can use squash and stretch to input speed

and physical information.