BALL & TAIL

I attempted to animate a bouncing ball with a tail. I used 4 spheres and parented the 3 smaller spheres to the main sphere. After that, I parented the smaller spheres to each other.

I animated the Main Parent (large sphere) all the way to the end of the timeline, then went back and animated the smaller spheres. It didn't come out exactly as I wanted and I wasn't sure if this method was the best way to do overlapping animation, but I wanted to try it myself with the tools I had learnt so far before going to research an easier/better way to do it.

Below is the ball and tail animation I made with the rig we were provided with. It came out quite bad because at the time I was unaware that I had to keyframe all the movements before adding any squash and stretch to the character. Doing it the other way around caused the tail to go in directions that I hadn't keyframed it to.

After my formative assessment, I was given some advice so I went back and tried to do another one. I still found it quite difficult but then realised what I was doing wrong. I had been keyframing the base, middle and end tail sections all on the same frames. So they were all moving to the same timing which didn't make the tail move/follow like a tail naturally would. The principles of overlapping and follow through were absent. I made adjustments to it after noticing that and animated the base, then the middle then the end on keys that were 3-5 frames after the previous handle. Could still make lots of improvements with the graph editor, but I understand the concept much better now.