Bouncing Ball Assignment

Before getting started, here are some tips. You may want to work on this assignment when someone else from the class is also working on it in the lab. It's often the case that you end up helping each other figure out different aspects of the process, and it's more fun ;-) Also, if you find you're spending a lot of time stuck on something, ask for help -- ask someone else in the class, or send us mail.

The goal of this assignment is to make an animation of a bouncing ball. Here are some simple steps to follow. First, if you haven't already, run through Tony's Intro to Layout tutorial to learn about Lightwave's Layout program. Then, make a simple bouncing ball by following Tony's bouncing ball tutorial. (Yes, there are a couple pictures missing, but the you should be able to follow the text.) Note: step 14 of this tutorial is a little tricky and if you have trouble figuring it out or what it means, just skip it -- we'll talk about it on Monday. It's related to the speed of the ball, and you'll need this kind of thing to wrangle the "slow in slow out" feature described below.

Next, as the ball bounces, modify its shape to have "squash and stretch" -- one of the fundamental principles of animation. You will find that there are buttons for squash and stretch in the Lightwave (Layout) interface.

Save your scene file in your home directory so you can show it off in lab Monday. This should be your directory at Arizona (H: drive?), not the local disk of the machine. Of course, also save various versions of your layout script in case you want to show them running inside Lightwave and/or compare notes on how it was done.

Now, for embellishments you may wish to add any of the following. However, you are certainly not obligated, as some people will find the basic assignment more challenging than others (while others may be excited to learn all the ins and outs of Lightwave ;-).

Add "slow in and slow out" -- another fundamental principle of animation. To see what this might look like, see here. (Note that when they say "constant speed" they mean "normal speed" or "without slow in and slow out".)
Make it a different object, e.g. a monkey.
Model your own object to bounce, for example a robot made of springs, or whatever you like.
Make the object have secondary action, for example the tail of the monkey waggles when it lands.

(For these next two you probably have to render out a series of frames using the renderer and then make a movie file from them using another program.)

Give your ball fancy material properties to make it look, for example, like a rusty metal ball or a basketball or whatever.
Add fancy rendering effects such as shadows or reflections.
Anything else that you think would be fun...