Flash tools

Starting of the Arts n Visuals category, I’ll present you a classic traditional animation technique yet very useful even now, especially for 2D animations, Squash and Stretch. Seeing an abundant genre of flash games concerning with balls especially bouncing balls, the Squash and Stretch technique might serve some help for those who wish to make more bouncing ball games.

Squash and Stretch is a traditional animation technique that is famously used by 2D animators and cartoon designers although not quite practical for 3D animators. It can give your object some realism and weight into it. When a moving object collides into a stationary object, it will deform on impact. Remember that no matter how much an object deforms from squashes and stretches is that it will always have the same volume. Also, the deformity would rather depend on the object’s rigidness and flexibility, so a rubber ball is most likely to deform more than a golf ball upon impact.

Usually with cartooning, the deformities are exaggerated and could either show more realism or make it more inherently funnier. An obvious example I have is a rubber ball.

Stretch - pre/post-impact

Squash - point of impact

With this example, a stretch is achieved when the ball shows speed (before and after impact) and a squash during the point of impact. Of course more stretch could be interpreted as a faster ball and more squash would show more impact strength. Although it could be exaggerated in both ways that it could also mean that the object is least rigid or not at all.

Although the best example to show this is a ball, any other object that posses proper rigidness can be used to show more speed and impact. Of course the squash and stretch technique is just one of the many ways to visually improve speed and impact realism and/or exaggeration.

Other Keywords

• Flash animating ball bounce.
• Flash animation, ball game action-reaction.
• Flash animation tips & tricks.
• Animation effect, speed, bounce, etc.