Bouncing Ball Robot Animation

Hello I am Luca Stringer,

This is an animation that I made that I thought was pretty cool, this took me so long to make. This is definitely an intermediate animators project. This took me about a month to make. At first thought that I had to make each individual ball and animate them and add rigid body physics. I was very wrong. There is a much easier way to do this. It's called a particle system. I made two versions of this project. The first one I made a mistake in and the second one I did not. I just wanted to show you both.In the first version didn't add the glass breaking screen. The ball was barley touching the camera when it fell and the sound didn't make sense so I re did it.

All you will need is:

-Computer

-Blender

-Canva

-Patience

For this you will use Blender. Blender is my preference when I'm doing anything graphics related. Open up Blender and then once your in there just think of the scene you want to create. Whether it's a school or an alien ship you will need some key components of your scene. The Emitter (the thing that shoots the balls). The Ground (the thing that gives the balls the bounce). The Main Character (the thing that the animation is about). Then make an instance object. That is the object that you want all of the objects that are falling from the Emitter to look like. I'll show you how to texture the objects all different colors after.

You should have the scene you want in your head. First press Ctrl+s and save your file so you don't loose your hard work (That's happened to me before.) Then create one large plane. That will be your floor. Then create another large plane. Scale it to the size of the floor, this will be your emitter.

Now you can make your character. I went into another Blender file just so I didn't have to deal with all of the lag. I just whipped up a quick robot that looked cool. You can make whatever character for this project. You can even 3D scan yourself and then animate you. I made my robot like the Instructables robot. Then I animated it to have that kind of robot swivel, I then found out that when I moved the robot to my original blender workspace that had the ground and the emitter it wasn't the right size and it was facing the wrong way. I just added a plane axis empty and then parented it to the robot and then I could scale and rotate the empty without effecting the animations of the robot, it's super cool. I animated my robot using keyframes. How you animate your robot you first press (I) when you have the thing you want to animate. Then you move the thing, you can rotate it, scale it, change it, anything. Then press (I) again and then blender will assume the motion between those keyframes and it will make that into an animation.

So the way you make the particles fall you'll need an Emitter. Make sure your Instance Object is near. Raise your Emitter (the plane that we made in the 2 step) a little bit. Then click on the particles tab to the right in the blender workspace. Then click the plus sign (+) and it will automatically add it as an emitter. You can adjust the size of the balls and the velocity at which they fall. You can select your instance object and the shapes falling will look just like that object. Remember to make the floor active too. You need to make it have that bounce.

To make the balls actually bounce and not just fall and stay there you will need to add collision physics. The ball is not bouncing It's the floor plane that is making the ball bounce. Like a trampoline, but the floor plane doesn't move. To add collision physics go to the physics tab and then click collision. Then select passive, not active. You can then change the bounciness in the settings of the collision physics tab. That's how you make the floor plane bouncy.

So in this animation the camera falls to the ground and rolls. I made this with rigid body physics. To make the camera you will need to make a cube and scale it so it fits perfectly around the camera. Make sure it is hidden in render and the viewport so it doesn't block the camera view. Then select the cube and go to the physics tab and select rigid body. Then select "Active". You can make the weight anything you would like. I made my weight 10 kg. Then select the camera and then the cube and press ctr+p to parent them, select "Object (keep Transform)" now whenever the cube moves the camera moves with it. I added it so that the camera falls at a certain frame rather than falling right when you press play. I made mine fall when a ball was wicked close to the camera. To animate the camera like this you will need to go to the physics tab, where the rigid body section is and then you will see two check boxes named "Dynamic" and "Animated" Always have "Dynamic" checked. For the frames leading yup to the frame that you want. First, click the little diamond next to "Animated" while it is checked at the first frame. Then go to the frame before you want your camera to fall and then click the little diamond again while "Animated" is still checked. Then go to the frame where you want it to fall and then uncheck the "Animated" box and click the little diamond again. Now if you play it over again you will see that the camera falls at that point. To make the camera fall and then do a little bounce you will need to be a certain height above the floor plane. Now your camera is animated. I also lowered my camera's focal length to 17 mm so it could see everything in the peripherals and not just in front of it.

To texture everything you will need the Node Wrangler. You can just get that in the preferences. Click on the instance object and then go into the shader editor on the bottom panel. Then make these nodes. I have screenshotted the nodes above. First add a principal BSDF if there is not one already. Then add an abject info and color ramp node. This makes it so that every ball has a random color between the colors you select. Connect the nodes as I did above. To change the color ramp colors you will need to click on the sliders and then click on the color that you clicked on below the slider. If you clicked on a green slider you will see the color green below. Click on that and then you can select your color. Then select another color at another slider. You can add so many sliders. To texture the robot and the ground you will click on the object and then go into the shader editor. and click on your Principal BSDF (Once again if there is not one you can create one by clicking the "New" button in the shader editor.) and click on the Node Wrangler tab. Click on "Add Texture Setup" and then where it says "Open" you can open an image to texture the item. To add just a simple color setup you don't have to use the Node Wrangler. Just click on the white color and select the new color. To make the object have a metallic shine or look you can adjust the metallic slide. I also textured my floor plane to match a tar road. You can also adjust the roughness (The roughness can make the object shiny, low roughness makes it very shiny whereas high roughness makes it completely matte.) That's how to texture the object.

To render your scene you will first need to make sure that the render settings in the modifier tab is checked. If it's not you won't see it. I made this mistake and I spent 1 week trying to troubleshoot this. Once you know that's checked you go to the render tab and make sure that the render engine is EEVEE. Then set your start frame and your end frame. For the output select JPEG for the image file type. Then select your output path (The folder were your pictures will go.) Then you can go to the render tab at the top of the window and click "Render Animation". Or you can press Ctrl+F12. Then your pictures will go into your folder once they are rendered. Rendering can take a very long time or a short time depending on your computer and if it has a lot of RAM or not. You definitely should have a graphics card in your computer if you want to do complex animations or models. If you don't no biggie (I don't have one) your computer will just be a little bit laggy on those complex animations and models.

Now you have to take all of the pictures that you have rendered and make them into one video. In order to do this you will need to save your .blend file for your 3D workspace and then click Ctrl+n, then click Video Editing. You will also need to have a YouTube channel in order to access the YouTube music library, they have free music and sound effects. You don't even need to make your channel public or post on it. Now once you're in your video editing workspace you will see your files on the top right. Go to the folder where all of your pictures are and drag them onto the sequencer (the thing on the bottom). Then click add image strip. Then you can adjust the frame amount, the amount of frames that you rendered. The you can find the audio files that you have for the sound effects and/or music and drag them over. The audio will play over the video. You can drag the sound effect on the sequencer to match the exact movements of the robot or balls.

I made the glass breaking animation in Canva. I did it by finding a broken glass over a black background and I downloaded it. Then I layered it over my animation in blender and timed it up perfectly with the sound and when the ball hits the camera. Then I added a background remover for the image so there wasn't any black and it turned out great.

Yay! You've finished your project! Now you can show your family what you made. I have so many more projects on my profile and on my YouTube Channel.