Category: Week 3 – Animation

For this animation sketch, I tried to show the principles of solid animation, slow in and slow out, and arcs. Originally, I wanted to recreate a basketball bouncing up and down and slowing down because of gravity. Then after I accidentally changed a variable, it created what looked like a basketball being bounced towards the screen. I thought this animation looked a lot cooler so I decided to go with it. It appears as though the ball travels in an arc towards the viewer’s screen. Also, it looks as though the basketball speeds up mid-bounce; the basketball starts slow, speeds up as it gets closer to the screen and then slows down again when it is right in front of the viewer. The hardest part was trying to incorporate solid animation; I wanted to make a sphere rather than just an ellipse. I had to make my sketch 3D; I explored the processing website to learn about how to control the ball’s location and how to make the shape bigger and smaller.

https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/509171

For my animation I wanted to incorporate loops so It could look more dynamic when it compiled. This wasn’t to bad because I just built off of the code we did in class and played around with the number and and other built in functions of processing until I got something I enjoyed watching. My animation is supposed to represent anticipation because of the way the program fades out the background every time the circles make a move. It gives the viewer a sense of when things are acting normal and when they are about to act up.

 

https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/509233

For this principles of animation exercise, I tried to show the principles of slowing in and out as well as squashing and stretching by animating a bouncing ball. The ball bounces in the x direction from side to side – as it gets closer to the center, it speeds up and becomes thinner (squashed); as it moves towards the other side, it slows down and goes back to normal size. This is the opposite when the direction is reversed. I actually had a lot of trouble creating this animation – I was trying to emulate some of the concepts from my lecture notes, but I kept running into obstacles. The slowing in/out wasn’t too hard to figure out, once I realized I had to create a variable for speed and add to it when the ball got closer to the center, and subtract from it when the ball moved away. I had the most problems with the squashing. I knew I had to create a variable for the squash and set it as the width of the ellipse, which wasn’t too hard. But when I added the variable into my if statements, the ball kept growing and didn’t stop. Later, I ran into a new problem where the ball would keep going faster and faster and wouldn’t slow down. Basically, to solve these problems, I just tried everything I could think of. I moved if/else statements around and tried to use different conditions for those if/else statements. Eventually, after trying many different things, I found that using a different condition for the if/else statement worked, and the ball consistently sped up and slowed down as well as squashed and unsquashed.

https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/508591