A Computer Animation by Corey Herchenroder and Gary McNutt

This animation can be viewed here

The Story

At the start of the animation the viewer sees a room with a box, garbage can, broom, and door. The lid of the box opens and a basketball pops out.

The ball bounces around in the room knocking over the various objects in the room. When the ball bounces off the garbage can, the garbage can falls over and the lid rolls around knocking over the broom. The ball hits the light then off the lid again. When the ball bounces off the door, the door swings open and closes again. The ball then rolls out of the room and into the next scene.

The second scene is in a gymnasium. The basketball does some spinning and bouncing and then heads for the net. The ball bounces off the rim, taking a high bounce. The backboard shatters and the glass fragments fall to the ground.

The basketball then falls down through the hoop and lands on a large shard of glass, puncturing the ball. The ball deflates.

The animation was done using Alias Wavefront Power Animator version 8.5. This tool was used to so all of the modeling and animation. Additional textures were created using Fractal Design Detailer version 1.0.

Most of the objects were moved using keyframes. Two of the five cameras in scene1 moved through the use of motion paths. I found this part of the animation particularly tricky, playing with the perspectives and option box for the path of the camera to create a fluent motion. My favorite camera was the one actually viewing from inside the fish tank!

A couple of the objects in scene1 were little tidbits of other groups wireframes, this was done to remember all the groups and the hard work they put into it, a sort of memoire of all the time put into the animations. Each object is referenced to the groups later in this document.

The light was a little time consuming to make. The chains are torus’ interlocked to create the desired effect, and the light bulb’s shader was done by increasing the incandescence and glow factors.

The basketball was simply a sphere with a texture applied to it. The texture was created with Fractal Design Detailer. The Big Grain Rough texture was applied to an orange background and then black lines were drawn. The curved lines were drawn freehand using the mouse.

The backboard was a simple plane with a texture applied to it. This texture was also created with Fractal Design Detailer. The texture is simply orange squares drawn on a white background.

The backboard was given invisibility to give the appearance of glass. Many single frame renderings were done to find the best amount of invisibility to give the backboard. Not enough invisibility left a backboard that one could not be seen through, while too much invisibility left a backboard that could not be seen at all. The shattering of the backboard was accomplished by using the explode and extract operations in Alias. This also took quite a bit of experimentation to find a good number of fragments to explode the glass into and the number of fragments to group together in a chunk. Using a large number of fragments created more realistic looking glass fragments but really slowed the system down. The system would run so slow that work could not be done if the too many fragments were created.

The shattering of the backboard was done using keyframes. The randomize function was used to get translation in the x direction and rotation about all three axes. Translation in the z direction was keyframed separately. While performing the shattering of the glass could be done by operating on all chunks at the same time, the landing of the glass on the ground had to be done for each piece of glass separately. This required both translation in the z direction as well as rotation to be keyframed for each piece separately to get the pieces to lie flat on the ground. The one piece of glass which punctures the ball also had to be keyframed to get it under the hoop and oriented in the correct direction when the ball landed.

The backboard stand was modeled as a swept surface. A circle was swept through a curve to achieve the desired shape for the stand. It was not considered necessary to apply a texture to the stand so it was just given a dark color. No animation was performed on the stand.

The rim was also modeled as a swept surface. A small circle was swept around a large circle. When the basketball hits the rim the rim bends. This animation was cone by keyframing the rim CVs.

The walls and floors were modeled as planes with textures applied. The gymnasium floor texture is a standard wood texture available from Fractal Design Detailer with no alterations. The texture was tiled on the floor to give the appearance of a hardwood floor. The gymnasium walls texture was created using Fractal Design Detailer. The Big Grain Rough texture was applied to a light gray background and black lines were drawn to give the appearance of concrete blocks. The wall texture was also tiled.

While we feel that all the requirements for the COSC 3P98 project were meet, there is still room for improvement. These are some of the changes we are planning to make to this animation.

The animation lacks coherence. The two scenes do not relate well to one another. We would like to eliminate the first room and some of its objects. This action would take place in a corner of the gymnasium. The ball would then bounce to the starting position of the second scene.

The creation of the ball texture was done after the first scene was rendered. The ball texture should be added to the ball. It would also be desirable to give the ball some rotation in the first scene. This only becomes important once the texture is applied. We would also like to add a wood texture to the box. This would look a lot better than the plain colors.

The second scene could use some more ball animation. Also, the timing in this scene is a little off. We may slow things down a little bit. There is also one piece of glass that does not fall over when it hits the ground. This should be taken care of.

The original idea for this animation included the broom coming along at the end to sweep up the mess. Time ran out for us to include this. We would like to add this part to the animation.

Other Contributors

We wish to thank the following people for their contributions to our animation:

William and Fayez for their rocket

Carolyn and Mayumi for their fish

Paul and James for their clock

Meg Richardson and Mike Ure for their ornament and finally,

Jackie Chan and Jeff Hang for their spearfisherman image.

Other Animations

Rui and Jining

Jason and Suling

Sean Dwyer

As I figure where the others are I will post them!

Back to 1999 animations.