My goal was to use the techniques learned in the bouncing ball syllabus to assist the fox character in jumping with some characterisation. Even though the final product was quite choppy, it allowed me to have a greater understanding of how a bouncing ball technique can be applied to characters in a simplistic form. For the jumps, I only had to copy the same technique I had learned previously, the only difference being is now I had to animate a tail to follow the character.
Making the tail follow the fox is both simple and complex at the same time. It follows similar logic to that of a chain – continuing the momentum slightly delayed after the input. The inertia carries the momentum allows the ‘chain’ or in this case, the tail, to whip back and forth as the fox jumps.
This is achieved by breaking down each component of the fox’s tail and delaying it in the animation graph so that the hop effects have time to allow energy to pass from the base of the tail to the tip of the tail.
