Hello! This post might be geared more toward hand-drawn animation enthusiasts, but anyone is welcome to chime in. As many of you might know, the bouncing ball is a great exercise for beginners to dip their toes into the animation world and familiarize themselves with concepts like timing, spacing, squash & stretch, etc. Attach a tail to it and you can easily introduce some follow-through and overlapping action into the mix. On the surface, the exercise seems quite simple. And you don’t have to achieve the most realistic result in order to fulfill the purpose of the exercise – practice the aforementioned concepts. However, I always found it difficult to achieve a bouncing ball that is also believable. More often than not the ball would be squashing and stretching and bouncing but... in an odd way. Some of the main problems I would identify would be: - the forces of gravity would seem inconsistent with each bounce; - the energy loss after each bounce would be off; - the reduction in squash in stretch would not match the energy loss the ball would experience; The way we apply squash and stretch to an object can give us information about its mass, the material it’s made of, and so on. But if the way the object behaves during the animation is inconsistent with its pre-determined properties, then the animation starts losing believability. This is my latest attempt at some bouncing balls (with a tail) that are a bit cartoony but also believable throughout the animation. I’m still not 100% happy with the result, but I also can’t really figure out what the problems are. Is this just a case of fine-tuning? Or is there more going on? So, based on what I described previously, if anyone would like to take a look at these 3 bouncing ball variations and offer some feedback I would highly appreciate it. Thank you!