How to Jelly Bounce a Ball in Autodesk Maya 2026

I was looking on Youtube and here on Instructables and found that there wasn't a lot of beginner Maya content for 2026, so I wanted to create something simple, basic and easy. I was heavily inspired by the simplistic explanations from Alan Balodi's Maya Tutorial: How to create your first animation (Simple Ball Bounce) video from 6 years ago. However, this video has become outdated, so I wanted to make a similar version for 2026.

Without further ado, here is a simple guide to making a ball bounce with a jelly effect in Maya 2026.

Autodesk Maya

To start, turn on all of the buttons under Edit Mesh and Mesh Tools to enable dynamic editing. This will make it easier to edit the ball.

Next, you want to create a ball in the workspace using the menu in the top left.

After that, hold down the D key and then press X and snap to bottom.

Then, change the frames per second on the bottom from 200 to 24.

If not already so, right click the timeline and set the playback speed to real time.

Make sure to turn on the auto keyfram toggle. After that, choose frames 1 and 24 and press S.

If you press play now, you will see that it is currently very simplistic.

To make it look cooler, we will open the graph editor.

In the graph editor, I would recommend playing around with the points to see what you like and what you don't. Once you are happy, go ahead and close the graph editor.

To create the jelly effect, all you have to do is make the ball flat near frames 1-3 and make the ball long at frame 8 and 17. Make sure the ball is normal size at frame 12.

With that, your ball is bouncing with a jelly effect! If you aren't quite happy, I would recommend playing around with the ball size at frames 8 and 17.