Boing??
Randy,
I tried to get a good bouncing ball the other day, and here's my recipe:
-Create a ball using the primitive sphere. Move the axis down to the
ball's
South Pole. Save the object.
-Create a ground. Save it. (And PLEASE, don't give it a checkerboard
effect!
Try Pastella, with various shades of green and blue, and a detail size
of 500.
In the Action editor:
-Make the max # of frames 30.
In the Stage editor:
-Load the ball and the ground. Add an axis; we'll point the camera to it
later.
-Add a two-point open path. Make it a straight vertical line, 600 units
tall.
The bottom of the path should be at 0,0,0. Save the path as
"Down.path".
Rename the path as DOWN.PATH.
In Action:
-Delete the ball's Position track and add a new one, from frame 1 to 13.
Label it
a "Follow path" and enter DOWN.PATH as the path name. Enter 12
acceleration
frames and an ending speed of 100.
In Stage:
-Go to frame 1. The ball should appear at the top of the path. If it
appears at
0,0,0 then your path points are in the wrong order; switch them around.
Warning:
simply exchanging their positions is not sufficient. You also need to
rotate
each point to get a straight line from one to the other, without
"shooting past"
the point and bouncing back to it. Save the path.
-By the way, if the path was pointed the wrong way, I suggest you rename
the
object file down.path to up.path, since we'll need such an object
below. This
way, you won't have to create the up.path. Once the file is renamed,
you can
proceed to edit down.path.
-Do a test anim of frames 1 to 13: the ball should believably accelerate
down the
vertical path as if it were affected by gravity.
-We now need to create a second vertical path, except this time it will
go
upwards. The point coordinates should be 0,0,0 and 0,0,600, just like
Down.path.
Name this path UP.PATH. (If you needed to correct down.path above, then
simply
[ MORE ]