Procedural Animation

Coding
1

On my journey to learning PyMel, I wrote a simple bouncing ball animation script. Currently it generates far more frames than it needs to but incase it helps anyone, enjoy!


import pymel.core as pm;
from math import *

pm.newFile( force=True );

fps = 30;
animationLengthInSeconds = 10;
totalFrames = fps * animationLengthInSeconds;
numberOfBounces = 3.0;
startingAmplitude = 5.0;
PI = 3.14159;
groundY = 1.0;

obj = pm.polySphere(name="MySphere");

pm.autoKeyframe( state = True );
for currentFrame in range(1, totalFrames+1):
    pm.currentTime(currentFrame, edit=True );
    pm.setKeyframe();
    
    t = float(currentFrame) / totalFrames;    
    currentAmplitude = (1.0-t)*startingAmplitude;    
    
    y = groundY + abs( sin( (t * PI) * numberOfBounces ) * currentAmplitude );
        
    pm.move( 0,y,0, obj );