Blender Animation Exercise – Animated Ball Drop

I started to dive into Blender animation techniques by taking the CGCookie Animation Bootcamp course. It’s a good introduction to the controls available in Blender for animation, along with a refresher on basic animation concepts.

For one of the exercises, I animated falling balls and had them interact with each other and the uneven ground. There is no squash or stretch yet in the animation: this is a straight-on shot with some simple translation and rotation changes.

It was fun getting the different interactions, and I am proud of the result. It has been quite a while since I opened up a graph editor and moved around keyframes and spline handles.

Here is my final result, using a simple viewport render straight to a video file (in other words: low quality).