Bounce ball!

Bounce ball in 2D

So here's my quick test trial in photoshop that I created last year. This is literally a red elipse in Photoshop, animated through a series of key frames. I drew the bounce path on a separate layer and once finished, turned that layer off and exported it as a gif file.

And here's my bouncing ball created in 3D in Maya! 

 We used the graph editor to smooth out the path of the bounce - when I could 'see' the arches that the Y axis coordinates created, I realised that it was the computer equivalent of  the hand drawn bounce path that I created last year in photoshop layer that I'd turned off.  Wow! The graph editor suddenly made sense.....until... that is.... it came to adjusting the graph for timing!! That made no sense! Practice, practice, practice!

Graph editor showing the Y axis (green) bounce path