how to make a believable pseudo3D ball

[Christina]

here's a trick for making a 3D-looking ball.

I created a 12-frame animation for a metal ball (with a few dents and cracks on its surface)using Zbrush and photoshop. The animation is of a ball rolling Up.

Then, I created a 12-frame animation of the same ball going up, but this time the ball had a solid color (purple) round Marking on it. I got rid of the ball and kept the Marking animation as an object.

Since animating a 3D ball would take animating a lot of angles, I give the ball's animation an UP direction constantly, and I set the Marking object to Always-> follow Ball, with "automatic rotations" enabled.

I also told the Marking object: set Dir=Dir(Ball), set AnimationSpeed= AnimSpeed(Ball) and set its ink effect to subtract.

It's not a masterpiece, but in a fast-paced game (pinball?) it works wonders.

here's the file (no custom ball engine, just the default bouncing ball movement, for simplicity):

http://dl3.ohshare.com/v/8896308/pseudo3D_ball.mfa.html

hope this isn't completely useless to your games
kisses
Christina
www.darksprite.chaos-rules.com

[LazyCoder]

That's pretty neat looking.