Mathias Aubry shares a collection of rigged balls.
Mathias writes:
Hello everyone!
As we know, one of the best way to start learning animation is by animating a bouncing ball. Then we can play with different type of balls since they are going to react differently. For example, the animation of a beach ball will be completely different from a bowling ball, or the bounce of a golf ball will be different than the bounce of a ball for kids made of plastic...
To help you to enjoy this exercise and to help you to focus only on the animation part, I'm happy to share with the blender community this set of rigged ball that represents most of the balls we know.
All these balls should be at the right proportions which is 1 blender unit = 10cm. The controls are the same on each one of them except the football which doesn't have the rotation (use the main controller, the big red circle, to rotate it). The controllers allow you to stretch and squash the balls, but also to deform them even further and to rotate the ball while keeping the deformation!
You can download them on animation lounge
I'm looking forward to see what you will do with them!
Mathias Aubry
8 Comments
Thanks for the share. I've been wanting something like this for awhile.
I'm a little confused about the dimensions, though. 1 unit is generally held to be the same as 1 meter.
That's what I read somewhere too. (in "Blender for Dummies", I think) But maybe someone can use them as props to animate "A Voyage to Brobdingnag" (= Gulliver and the giants) ? An idea with potential ! :-)
Or just scale them down ?
In any case, thanks for sharing, Mathias ! :-)
My pleasure :)
Sorry I forgot to check the message to reply to them. For the scale I didn't know the rule about 1u = 1meter, It might also depend on what you are working on. But anyway, the main controller allow you to scale them the way you want as Mxd said. :)
And I'm happy that it's something you were looking for.
Mathias.
I built a set of balls similar to this last year and I must say, it's a great way to learn polygon flow on a variety of simple objects. I highly recommend it to anyone.
Some other balls you might consider adding:
- sliotar (like a baseball but with the stitch lines 'inside out')
- a Richard Lindon button ball (the original mass-produced English football circa 1861)
- a croquet ball
- bocce balls (both circles and squares)
- Australian rugby ball
- medicine ball (there are some models with handles cut into the surface, a real modeling challenge for anyone at an intermediate level)
- volleyball
- cricket ball
Each of these presents a unique challenge.
it's true, it was a good exercise, and for me it was really interesting to rig them too.
I cheated. I used a rig from an animation tutorial series I bought. :) Still, it's nice to have all those rigged balls.