First add images of the bouncing ball graph
Planning this out I began thinking about weight values and squash and stretch – the first few times I scrubbed through the keyframes I’d added so far looked uncanny because the ball didn’t behave like a ball, it didn’t change shape on impact with the ground and wasn’t stretched by its upward motion. The ball also appeared as if it was floating up and down rather than being moved by a force from left to right as it bounced, so I had to “break” the tangents in the graph editor first so that they could be adjusted:
The green line, representing the ball’s movement from left to right, had to be adjusted by each individual keyframe to round out the ball’s trajectory, this produced a more realistic looking bounce.
Adding in squash and stretch using the scale controls shown below. Using the Object tab on the right hand side I adjusted the Translate Y axis from 0.4 in the frame before impact to -0.5 to the frame containing the impact.
The below screenshot shows the keyframes clustering around each impact of the ball against the ground:
I wanted to rotate the ball as it moved but I wasn’t able to find the controls for this in the rigged model, if I have more time in the future I can revisit this task to include rotation and texturing.