Everything Starts with a Bouncing Ball
The bouncing ball is fundamental in animation. It’s more than just a simple exercise-it’s a way to bring weight and life to characters and objects. While it’s essentially a trick or formula, mastering it opens the door to applying the principles to countless scenarios.
This exercise focuses on a vanilla bouncing ball-no squash and stretch-designed to practice timing and spacing. The goal is to create the impression of acceleration as the ball drops to the ground.
In the animation, the motion path reveals the spacing:
At the top, tighter spacing creates a slower motion.
As the ball falls, the spacing increases, reducing the number of frames and giving the sense of speeding up.
On the way back up, the spacing reverses to convey deceleration.
To refine my technique, I animated two bouncing balls. Using one as a reference helped me spot differences and avoid aimless adjustments. I found the ball on the left more convincing-it felt like it was truly fighting gravity on the return. The ball on the right, however, felt too "snappy" and abrupt. Interestingly, the differences in the graph editor were minuscule, but those tiny tweaks made a huge difference in how the motion felt.
I did run into a funny issue. My animation frames started at 1, but I’m used to starting at 0. This mismatch completely threw off my calculations. After some head-scratching (and questioning my math skills), I realized what was wrong. It was a small oversight, but it taught me to double-check my frame setup before starting next time!