Advanced Animation / Exercise

April  30, 2025 -  2025

30.04.2025 - .2025 / Week2 – Week 6

Ryoma Kato / 0365874

Advanced Animation / Bachelor of design (Honours) in Creative Media

MIB

Exercise

Exercise 1 : Bouncing ball 3D animation.

Fort this exercise, we need to make 5 types of animation by using blender. (Soccer Ball, Ping Pong Ball, Bowling Ball, Beach Ball, Squash and Stretch)

( Edit screen in Blender 1 )

First, I write the line of movement of the soccer ball. To create the animation frame, press the “I” button to record the animation in the blender.

( Edit screen in Blender 1 )

Since the soccer ball rolls while rotating, I created an animation of the ball's rotation as well as its bouncing motion at second.

This is how I make a soccer ball animation for this exercise.

( Edit screen in Blender 2 )

For the beach ball animation, I changed the looks of the ball and edit the bounce of the ball was adjusted. I watched the reference video and saw no particular change in the number of rotations with the soccer ball, so I did not make any changes to the number of rotations.

( Edit screen in Blender 3 )

( Edit screen in Blender 4 )

Next is bowling ball animation. For this animation I change the bounce hight and rotation times of the ball. First Image is editing screen for bouncing animation and second one is for rotation. The bowling ball is very heavy and doesnt bound high so I animated to shorten the bounds. The number of revolutions is rotated more than a soccer ball or a beach ball because the bowling reference video had more revolutions than a soccer ball or a beach ball, so it is rotated more than one revolution.

( Edit screen in Blender 5 )

For the ping pong ball animation, I edit the bounding hight more higher than soccer ball.

( Edit screen in Blender 6 )

The last is Squash and Stretch animation. This is the image of editing screen of the ball bouncing animation. When the ball lands on the ground, we created an animation so that the ball stays there for 5 frames. 

( Edit screen in Blender 7 )

( Edit screen in Blender 8 )

( Edit screen in Blender 9 )

For the Squash and Stretch animation, I adjusted the parameters so that the ball reaches its maximum stretch at the moment it hits the ground, and animated it to gradually squash towards the end of the five frames as it comes to a stop. I also adjusted the animation so that the ball reaches its maximum stretch in the frame immediately after the five-frame pause, right after it leaves the ground.

( Edit screen in Blender 10 )

And also, when the ball reaches the highest point of its bounce, it appears to return to its original shape, so I set the animation so that the ball returns to its original size each time it reaches the peak of the bounce.

Exercise 2 : Pendulum

For this exercise, we need to make an Animation of penrum.

( Edit screen in Blender 1 )

This is the first screen that I opened pendulum blender file.

( Edit screen in Blender 2 )

First, I created an animation of the pendulum moving horizontally. I set it so that it reaches the target position at frame 25. This part wasn’t too difficult, as it only involved placing keyframes at the desired positions.

( Edit screen in Blender 3 )

Next, I moved on to animating the tail section of the pendulum. I started by working on the part where the tail connects to the main body of the pendulum. As shown in the image above, I set the parameters so that after the pendulum stops its horizontal movement, the tail continues to swing left and right, gradually losing its kinetic energy.

( Edit screen in Blender 4 )

After that, I began animating the middle part of the tail. Since in real life the swing of the tail becomes wider toward the tip, I created the animation so that the tail’s movement had a larger amplitude than the base connected to the pendulum.

( Edit screen in Blender 5 )

Finally, I worked on animating the tip of the tail. I made it swing side to side with a wider motion than the other two parts. Since the quality of this animation greatly affects the overall appearance of the pendulum animation, it was the most challenging part to create.

Exercise 3 : Snow Emotion Pose

This assignment involves editing the facial expressions and poses of a pre-distributed humanoid 3D character called "Snow" to express four emotions: Happy, Sad, Angry, and Scared.

For the first step, I found an image to use as a reference for the pose and pasted it on the slide.

I used the above slide as a guide to start creating emotional poses in Blender using Snow's distribution model.

This is the image of Blender editing screen of Happy pose. To create this pose, I started by making the Snow model, which was originally in a T-pose, jump. Then I bent both legs and adjusted the arms at the end. Since the "Happy" pose was easy to imagine, it was also easy to create.

This image shows the "Sad" pose. At first glance, it seems simple because only the arms and hands were moved. However, while working on it, I faced unexpected challenges—such as the wrists bending in strange directions and the finger joints not looking natural. So, despite looking easy, creating this pose was actually quite difficult.

This is the "Angry" pose. Similar to the "Sad" pose, editing the arms, hands, and fingers was quite challenging. The main difficulty was the same—some joints bent in unnatural directions, which required careful adjustments.

I also struggled with creating the facial expression. Making an angry face was harder than I expected. Simply making the eyes bigger ended up looking more creepy than angry. It wasn’t until I adjusted the eyebrows together with the eyes that the expression finally started to look properly angry.

Finally, this is the "Scary" pose. Like the "Sad" and "Angry" poses above, editing the fingers was tricky, and the joints sometimes bent in strange ways. However, since this was the last pose I created, I had become more used to the process, and it was the easiest to complete among the three.

One detail I focused on was expressing a sense of fear. To show that the character was truly scared, I curled the fingers inward to create a trembling, frightened look.

REFLECTION

Through Exercise 1, where I animated a bouncing ball, I learned how to move 3D materials in Blender. In Exercise 2, I created a pendulum animation and learned how to animate objects with more complex rigs and more detailed movements. In Exercise 3, I practiced posing using a pre-rigged character model called "Snow" and learned how to create poses with a rig.

These three exercises helped me understand the basic process of creating 3D animation in Blender. I also discovered that knowledge from the 2D animation class—such as how to squash and stretch a ball—was very useful in 3D animation as well.

Since this was my first time creating 3D animation, I knew the projects were simple, but I still faced many challenges because I wasn’t yet used to the controls. Even so, I really enjoyed working on 3D animation.