Animation Exercise - Rolling Ball

Another practice exercise for animating. Some slight improvements since last time.

First I decided on the 4 major key frames (in this case, the ball at the top of the hill, then at the bottom of the hill, then colliding against the wall, then coming to a stop). I think part of the problem I ran into last time was trying to focus on too many things at once--trying to establish the major positions, figure out how many seconds each part should last, and get the correct spacing between every frame all at the beginning sort of confused things. In this exercise I took it one thing at a time and I understood what to do a little more for each part.

One issue I had to overcome was the perceived speed of the ball. In the previous exercise the ball sped up and slowed down randomly, which is... unrealistic. I realized that the simple solution was to have the ball move an equal distance--no more, no less-- on successive frames to give the impression of constant speed. Before I realized that, for the inbetweens I was just trying to create a halfway point between all of the key frames, which ended up moving the ball various distances--giving the impression of random speed changes.