Bowling Ball

Above is my finished Bowling Ball bounce.
I did a number of captures to improve it each time:

Capture 1 – looks at timing mostly using dope sheet, without any look into curves.

Capture 2 – start to add in a few F-Curves. The first bounce looks good as it hits and comes straight back up.

Capture 3 – Changes to the height the ball reaches of a few of the bounces, notably the first bounce and the ones at the end.

Capture 4 – Fix glitch at the peak after the first bounce.

Capture 5 – Making the whole clip generally at a quicker pace.

Capture 6 – Another timing change, paying particular attention to the end.

Capture 7 – Looking at giving more time for the peaks of the first and second bounces.

Capture 8 – After successfully improving the first peak, attempting to improve second peak.

Capture 9 – Changes to the heights of a few of the bounces, giving them more time at a peak. I also made some timing changes to the end of the clip. I think this is the first time it generally looks very similar to my reference video.

Capture 10 – I was playing around with a few of the buttons on the F-Curve Editor, and found the ‘Point at Neighbouring Keys Slope Orientation’ button, which allowed me to really sharpen up the bounces giving a Linear bounce look, while leaving the peaks to have a more of a Spline Curve. Again I think this was a big step forward in my captures.

Capture 11 – I edited the first two bounces with their height both raising slightly.

Capture 12 – In this final capture, I made the gap between the 3^rd peak and 3^rd bounce 2 frames longer. I now think this bowling ball capture is pretty much completed.

Capture 13 – I added a little bit of ‘squash’ and ‘stretch’ to it, just to give it a bit of life. I haven’t done much as it is a heavy object in comparison to the tennis ball I have to do, which will have a lot more squashing and stretching.

Capture 14 – To finish off I re-looked at the peaks of the bounces and just simply lowered them in a few of them.