I took the previous animation exercise and turned him into one of those cheesy ‘drinking bird’ novelties you see sometimes…although the weight is more unbalanced here than in the real toy, it still seems to tip pretty convincingly.

This part of the exercise was done last, after I understood how to make the graph editor do what I wanted…and it’s a good thing I saved it ’till the end, as it was much trickier to tweak the easing and timing on the bobbing motion to make it look like the weight was actually shifting and balancing itself. It isn’t perfect, but I think it works well.

(Click on the pic)

With the second ball, I played more with the curve handles and finer adjustments/easing for the bounce motion, but didn’t do the squash/stretch here.

The third ball incorporated squash/stretch (possibly a bit exaggerated) and learning how to break and weight tangents in the graph editor…really giving a much better control over the motion and making keyframing seem much less painful than I’d expected. Hurrah for the graph editor!

(In retrospect, the shadows might be a bit distracting, though. So much for trying to be fancy.)

(Click on the pics)