Bouncing Ball in Maya: 3D Animation for Begginers

1. Introduction to the class: Hello everyone, welcome to my new Skillshare class. My name is Nikolay in a parish and I am character animator and motion capture editor. In today's class, I will be teaching you how to do simple keyframe animation. In first exercise, we will do bouncing ball. Bouncing ball is really important because you can learn all the basic principles of animation only on bonds single ball. I hope you will enjoy. And let's begin. 2. Setting up Maya: Okay, I made a simple ball. You can make it here and Create. And here in Polygon Primitives, you gots fear. And then just a sec, I can show you. And then you just can double way is translate, E is rotate and R is scaled. So it's my gut. Totally different. Shortcuts. Then motion builder, I'm used to work in motion builder, so I always use motion builder shortcuts. So it's kinda tricky for me to do this on my shortcuts to, but we will use to it. And I made, I made here sphere and I just want to scale it. Yeah, you can scale it down. Big. If you take here in the center, you scale all axes, x, w and set two. But if you e.g. take this, you will see how it expanding in only that direction. Only that direction. If you take this one, e.g. it's expanding only in that direction. So same with this too. So if you want to expand in all direction, you just press here in the middle and do this. So I made the simple normal, like I went to modify, create a polygon primitives sphere. Here is the sphere, I'll just move it. So you can see here is that new sphere. And I will zoom a little bit so you can see. And if you press, if you select your object and press F, it will zoom that object. So if I e.g. press F on this, but this, it will zoom only this objects. So if you want to make it bigger or e.g. smaller, just press air. You got now, you also got that here, like Move Tool, its translation. Here is a rotation and here is scale. If you don't know shortcuts, just press it here so you get everything here too. I will just go back and add. And in the middle. And my holes sphere is going bigger or in the middle going down. So just scale it like that. It's uniform scaling in all axes. So in all directions. So I will delete this fear because I don't need it. I already made one in the scene, but I just wanted to show you guys how you can make your own sphere. Also you get here another primitives like cube cylinders, cone plane, and all of the things you need. Maya. If your first time in Maya, the interface can be really confusing. But don't worry guys. Just watch this class and I will show you everything you will need more than, you will not need for animation more than I show you. So let's begin. Press Space. And you can go to like click on my and then you can go through like right view space, click Top view space, click bec view. That is how you go from one view to another. Space. Click right to you space click back view. Or if you just press only space, you will see all views like e.g. it's like side backed up, front. And I will Lao go in like also you get a bunch of other things here, but it's not that important now. Now, it's just important for views. I will go here in perspective view and then I will press. Space. And you will have here perspective real top, bottom and front, front, front side, top and perspective, Sorry. Okay. We can start. Start now. I will, I would like to start from top view. Okay, Here Is, here. As you can see here, I wanna be in top view, but as you can see here, it says I am inside you so I will press Space and go to to, to, to to to front view. Okay. We've got now our scene in front. I showed you all the basic principle or principles. So Maya interface. So we will now go into, as you can see, here, is the bottom, but our ball is slightly down, so we will make her on here. We will just move it so It's kind of on floor. And we will press S to set a keyframe. Emotion builder. You press key and set a keyframe. But in my unknown, in Maya, keyframes are S. As you can see. Here, I got a keyframe and I process and got another keyframe and another, and another. So, yeah, that's how you press keyframes in. Maya. And I would like do this here, just e.g. so you can see? Uh-huh. Yeah. So S is keyframe. And I show you now all the basic principles. I will delete all of that. Or I can do this here. I will just select everything and go here and delete. I don't need anything. And it's not delete it here. Delete. Okay. I deleted all the keyframes, so we will start our animation. In the next video, I showed you all the basic principles and all the basic things we will, we will need in this class. So translation, rotation scale, and going from another camera view to another. So that's what these important thing for us. Now, the rest I will show you in the next class and see you in the next video where we'll start to do our band single bool. 3. Animating a Ball: Okay guys, so as you know now, all the basic things. So Maya, we can now start doing our bouncing ball. As I said, we will go to the top view. No, oh sorry, not top front view. If you press if you keep your keep your mouse, it will go in that view when you press space. So if I, if I put my mouse on perspective and I press Play, when I press space, it will go in perspective mode. If I want to go to front, I just put mouse here and press Space, and then we'll go in that front. Perspective mode, front mode. So let's begin. As I said, are bold should be 000 position, as you see here, our ball is in 067 or something. I will put it down on here onto, so it's on this line. As you can see, if I put it on zero. Why zero is a below this? Because the center and P watering pivot around of our bowl is in center. And that's kind of a basic line four. If I put it in 000, that our ball will be in middle of the scene. So I don't want to be I don't want to have our ball in middle of the scene. We will take this line, e.g. as a floor. So this bolded line will be our floor. So that's why I will in translation, why press two? Now, our bowl is like perfectly aligned with image. Imagine that our floor. So I will press S just to keep our bold there. And I made a keyframe. And let's go. Let's see. In ten frames, I will do just, I will just change the height of our bowl. And in 10th frame, I will press S. And that's it. Let's see what we got. 010010. Let's go now in 20 frame and go back in. I will just be precise. I will type here too, and I will press S here. So let's see what we got. Zero. Okay? Okay. Let's see. K, a graph editor is really important. I keep it here. That's why my scene is not that big, but I will try to zoom as much as I can so you can sorry. So you can see everything up. Sorry. I tried to show you. Okay. I got out. I don't know why I got that cube. I accidentally made a cube. So what I want to show you, it's over, Sorry. Just a sec. So Graph Editor is really important. That's why I will keep it here. Maybe you will, I will try to zoom in as much as they can so you can perfectly see what I'm doing, but Graph Editor is really important and that's why I need to keep it here so you can see clearly what I'm doing. So let's see again what we got. Now. We will play our animation. Okay? As you can see, our animation comes down in 20 friends and we get here like 30 frames. So I will change that here. And our last frame will be 20. So when I press our animation now, it will be immediately when he bounces down, he will go in the beginning. And again, we will make a loop animation. When we put a last frame here, it will be kinda looped animations and it will flow easily in nicely. We'll flow again. And we can. A scene. In that way. Here we missed something out or something is wrong. And when you watch your animation in loop, you can clearly see what you need to do is you can see now our boulders going down and up without any spin or anything related. First thing we're going to do now is to take, that's why I say are rough and it is important because graph editor is really first thing we will do now. Okay, Are horrible. Start doing going up and then fall down in the same time. And it's really kind of we want to make it cartoony. We want to make cartoony bouncing ball, but now we don't have that. How we will do that first thing, we will break the we will break the tongue and so we can do with them whatever we want. So if I don't press this one, if it's on this one, I can't move tangents the way I want, because if I move this, this will change. We don't wanna do that. We want to break our tangents. So if I move this, only this part will change how we're going to do that. We will select tangent in press this. And when I change here something only debt side will change, not least this one too. I will also do that here. I want to break tangents here too, and also here too. And maybe if I go here and double-click, I can go in tangents and free target rate or something like that. Yeah, I just wanted to say that you can select everything and go here to also to change the tongue tangents not only here, but in the beginning. We'll, we will do this with the shortcuts. So we all are used to workflow and everything. So what first thing we're going to do is to change speed of the ball. And we will take these tangents here and take this hand, tongue it here. Let's see what's changing here. Is you can see the bowl is fast, going from down and then slow, slow, slow down, and then stops. Here, stops and then go down again. So what we wanna do is to feel that bounds like bar. You can see that spin when it hits the floor, fastly goes up and then slow down being the air a bit and then goes down. So that's if you can see this side where it's zero spin, it goes with the same, here, goes with the same speed as we made the ball in here is like spin, like going fast after hitting down and then slows of it and stay. So we want to do that on this side to make that fast reaction. Yeah, So we will do that. And let's see how it goes. Yeah, we got it like spin, like really bounce, bounce, bounce and slowly. Decide v here. We can decide the height also. Okay, am I, Is my ball bouncing real high enough? So let's show you that. I will press pause and go here as as I moved here. Yeah. You can see that's like how high I want to be my bowl is. So let's see. Now. Is that too high, maybe a little lower. And also what you can do here is make how long your ball will be in the year. If I do this, Let's say e.g. what? It's really like uniform. Nothing happened like it when it goes down, immediately goes out. But if I do a bit of this and make it nicer, Let's see now what is going to be? It will be it will stay longer in the air. Let's do this. Yeah. And you will have that feeling legs slowly. I will actually put this here. Yeah. How does fill that, guys? Do you think? Also for animation, you need to get a really, really good feeling. Like to know, oh my gosh, this looks nice to me. Or to be like, Oh my gosh, something is off. You need to have that feeling to recognize is something is good or something is off. That's why animation is pretty hard job. Because you need to have that kind of feeling, okay, this looks good to me, or this is too fast or too slow, or this something is off for me. For this first phase. Let's see. For this first phase, Let's This is perfect. Perfect. Yeah. And in the next video, we will start doing squash and stretch. We just have like bounds here. From top you can see anything because it's in the place, but in perspective mode, Let's see. Let's see. Yeah, it bounces pretty nice. So next thing we are going to do is to do squash and stretch. See you in the next video. 4. Adding Squash and Stretch: Okay guys, Now, when we got our timing, we can go to squash and stretch. Then bowl is sitting on the floor. It Let's do it here. Then ball is on the floor, It's squashes and it, when it goes down, it stretches. So first thing we're going to do is let's go into the front. And we will, we will go actually in the perspective mode and take this as it goes down on, on. Let's see here better and you need to see whole context. We will squash the bowl. We will do this. In top view. As you can see, we put down, it's not like high anymore. We just squash it like this. And we will stretch it like in this direction. We will make it stretchy. And as you can see, our height is now a bit off, so we will need to make sure it's on the Nice. It's here, okay. And we will press S to save that. Let's see how it goes. Before I just forgot to copy, I will just go copy paste this first pose. And let's see now, squash back into normal. And here we'll go to go be stretchy. Here, here will be stretchy. Okay. I haven't linked to take care of this tangent. Seem perspective mode, how it looks. Goulash. She needs to go like this and this one may collect small bones. Let's see. The front. Yeah. So K are bullies down, so just make this curve like nice. And this should be like this. Okay? So v goes from stretch. It's like anticipation ball is preparing to go up. So that's why we got first frame like this. It's ball is going down, preparing to jump like that. That's actually the point. And then bowl is normal. And here it starts to be like super, super, super stretchy. As you can see, I now make it bigger. And in perspective mode, what we will do with these two axes is like we will make them really small. You can see that the best in top view will meet small. But it will be not that small like here. It will be super big in y axis, but in Z and x it will be small. We will make her smaller and we will press S here. Let's see what we got. Okay. Let's see. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's see. What nice. What I see as a mistake here Is that, okay, let's first do this. To take care of the curves. You can see here is a bit messy. And what is actually Messi is that we want our translation here to be on the floor, not to be in the air, but first translation must be on the floor. Let's see how we will do that. Sorry, just to check. Translation will be here. S. So we want that change to stay on the floor. And now we can make this tongue and like this, and this one like this. It's like kind likely made here that kind of transition between the two of them. So let's see, floor, floor. Okay, so we want our on all three keyframes are contact to be this floor. So 011. Great. Let's see now how it looks. Nice. Now we can go 01, anticipation, preparing to jump and then Zhang Wo. And before it goes here, I will just like made maybe in this even more and in top view, even more smaller in this direction. And I'll press S. Let's see. Now x, so y is not the key. Okay, So what we wanna do here is to make the SEC, is to make our curve nice. So you can see how he made tangents here. So our curve is going nice and you can see this pop-up, that's wrong. So we want to make our curve nice. This, we said it must go like this and this, like this, and this. We will move this tangent here and make like nice bounds for everything. But what I want to also mention that here in third frame, we just wanted to do scale to make it bigger and dinner. So we actually don't care where is our translation. So we can delete that key is here. So I don't need translation key for this frame. I also don't need translation key for rotation. Actually, we don't need the rotation in here at all. So that's why I will delete it. But I can delete it because let me show you. As you can see, we cared about our floor or ground on 012. But for free, we want her to jump. So we don't need key there. Even if even if we put some key, we don't need it. Yeah. So it will not make any difference because we now don't want that to be ball on the ground. We want it to jump so we don't need that. So that, that's why I deleted it in first two frames. We cared. So because we wanted our ball to be underground. For our third frame, that's totally unnecessary because we just wanted to make our bowl cleaner and to go, looks nicer. So what we wanna do in the third frame, actually, in all frames for scale is to make nice curve. This is like some mass. So we will take this and make like nice, like, Whoa, nice girl, nice arc for every axis. Let's, let me show you like, Whoa, do this. We don't need to break tangents here. Like to, because we don't want to make spin or anything. We just want to make a nice, nice, nice, nice curve. Like Whoa, nice girl. Yeah. And also for just, we will go and do this like we'll have a nice curve. So let's see what we got. Let's go in perspective mode. And I'll make this a bit smaller. So you can see, let's see. Nice. Let's go e.g. in this one. Nice. And guys, as I said to you, don't be scared to overdo these things like, the more you actually do this or the more you here do this. And yeah, you know what I want to say to you like this, the more cartoony it will be, and don't be scared to overdo it, because that's how you will learn. How it will. In this way, you can add material. Is it gummies it hard? Is it on this way? You can materials your your object. Like is this gamete pool or I don't know, like that's how you add material to your object. Is it harder? Is it if it's, if it's stone, it wouldn't like bounce like this or stretch like this. It wouldn't stretch at all some, but we will come to that point. We will do, will do two different balls for now. Just explore, overdo it, do whatever you want. Just explore. And in the future classes I will show you how to do hardball, how to do a small light, light ball or. But I will show you that in the next class. For now, don't be afraid to overdo it. Don't be afraid to explore, don't be afraid to try anything you can imagine. So let's go to finish our bowl. Let's see. John comes up and goes down. Let's see how it looks. So we need to do now this size, sorry, this side. And how we are going to do that. So same way as we did this one. It's up and then goes down. Like here. As you can see, we can take this. We can actually copy paste everything. So you don't need to do anything by hand. That's the beautiful thing of animation that you do one side and you can only copy paste everything to the other side. Let's see, um, let's see, let's see, sorry. Let's see how we're gonna do that. Okay, we'll copy this. Copy and we will place it here, paste. So we got now. And then when it goes down, but in-between we need to have like, let me see this one, copy this one. And before this, we need to put this. So yeah. Because now in opposite direction, it first going stretching, then squashing. First likes dredge through the ground and then squash when bank and squash, and then goes back to normal. So let's see how it looks. Let's see. Okay, we got pops here. Let's see what's going on here. What's going on there? Why we got the pope? Well, okay, we will fix that. Now. You can see Bob, like something is wrong here. Well papa, papa. Let's see. Okay, select our bowl and go into them. And we can also copy this. You can press Shift and select and move with a double mouse. You can move your work. You can see how I'm moving. My yeah, I don't want to move anything. I just wanted to show you you you select Shift and select what keyframe you want. And then you can move it across the middle. Click. But I want to put this back in ten. I just wanted to copy this scale on the front third frame, copy and paste before this. Like here. Okay? What we got now, here is a mess. As you can see, our curves are a mess now on this side and we need to take care of them. First. We will go with translation. On x. Everything is fine on 0. And you can see here is the nice and here is the mass. So we will take care of that now. Yeah. So let's see what we can do here. So I made it nice. Yeah, make it nice. And this needs to be like to have like spin. This one needs to have spin and this one. So let's see. Nice. Let's see, now it's going on play. Okay. We still got some ballparks. Okay. Here is the alkene. Let's see the next Let's see the next one. Okay. We didn't have anything here. Rotational, so we don't have anything. And let's see what's going on with scale. Okay? See this tangents are too big. I will do this too small. You need, I need to make, this tongue gets smaller. And like this. And this one. Let's see it. Let's see now. This one, okay. Also this one to me. Yeah. Okay. This upside. I will open the tangents to make this one smaller. And now I can go back. Yeah, Then this one, this one is nice and this one, I'll break it, make this smaller and then uniform. Okay? Okay, Let's Play. And let's see why we got that. But what what okay. I just wanted to try something. Let me show you. Sorry. We will delete this last keyframe. Delete. Scale, also. Delete. And we will know all this. I will just press Shift and select all of these, and then middle mouse and move everything for one frame. And let's see how it goes. Okay, we don't have that pop anymore. Our animation is nice and fluid. But what I can see. What I wanna do is our animation like ghosts. And then immediately goes down. What I wanna do is put her in the make her stay in the air a bit more. Let's see how you do it. Okay. And I'm gonna just go a bit, okay? Okay, Just a sec. Let's do that. Let's make it a bit higher. Let's, the wider this is, the more in the ear should be. Okay, Let's play better. Let you guys think. Or also if you want to take her in the air a bit more, you can take okay. This one should be I forgot to move this one. Sorry. Do that now. So it will be like this. This is a war that lets say now. Okay, Let's see. Do this. Okay? And if I copy paste this one, no, it's a bit. Let's see now. And if I got the base, this one too. Yeah, this is a K and smaller. And smaller. And also this one should be like this. This should be like this. Let's try it now. Yeah, It's got much more spin. You can see. And adding these two keyframes, it means she stays here a bit and then she's falling back down. Oh, what a spin. Okay. Maybe I overdo it here. Okay. Here. Zero work. Oh, let's see. It's really nice loop. I think we don't have any pops up, pop-up, 70 more. Retro guys think. Nice. Yeah, I like it. You know. That's it. I guess. Yeah, I like it. I wouldn't change anything. Definitely. Let's see it from all these perspectives side. Perspective, mode. Let's move it. Yeah. That's it, guys. Yeah, I like it. Yeah. Okay. As I said to you, I played with materials and wheat wheat squash and stretch to get that nice, cartoony style. So I will, I will tell you now in the next video, what is your project? And that's it for this video. Thank you all for watching. See you in the next class. 5. Class Project: Okay guys, as you know, we finished our bouncing ball. I hope you like it. I hope it's not too hard. And please, please, please remember that is, this is most important thing. When you are doing animations. And please take your time and do as many as you can. Bouncing balls with different typings, different heights. Because this is most important thing in the future, you will see the diverting is related to the bouncing ball. Everything you do, it's like everything you learn. You can learn from bouncing bolts. So this is most important glass for keyframe my animators. And please take your time and do your projects here. So here I will show you what will be your project. As you can see, this is my bouncing ball, but I want you to make your bus bouncing balls. You can try, as I said, different heights, different level of cartooning as with squashing and stretching, different timings. And remember that if you do this uniform bonds every, every time it's in the middle peak, peak it's in the middle of the timeframe. So that's why I made like 2020 phrase because it's like middling. Then it will be, it will be, it will go up in the middle. So please please please do your projects. I can't wait to see them. I can't wait to I can wait to respond to your questions if you got any, please ping me. Please comment down below in discussion area. Please do projects and please tell me, do you like this keyframe concept? And if you want to know more about motion capture animation, please go to other classes. They got that I am gaming animator doing motion capture mostly. And if you want to be video game editor and video game animator, you should consider taking motion capture classes is valves. So but if you want to just learn basic principles so you can take this keyframe courses too. So thank you so much for watching this video. Please do your project and see you in the next class. Thank you so much. Bye guys. 6. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much guys for taking this class. I hope you enjoyed and I hope it'll help you on your animation journey. If you've got any questions, please write them down in the discussion area and please guys do your project and upload them in the project gallery. I can't wait to see what you did. And also, if you want to learn more about motion capture and motion capture editing, please take a look into my other classes on Skillshare as well. Thank you so much. Again. See you in the next class. Bye.