Adding Squash and Stretch with Modifiers

To create the illusion of cartoon movement, traditional animators rely heavily on a technique called squash and stretch. If a cartoon villain runs off a cliff, for example, he will not descend to earth until he notices that he is suspended in the air. When he does descend, he will stretch on the way down, and then squash. You'll add a little squash and stretch automatically to the Ping-Pong ball using the Flex modifier.

Using the Flex modifier to generate squash and stretch 1. Open pingstart3.max and select the Ping-Pong ball. Files for this tutorial are on the World-Creating Toolkit CD in the \tutorials\intro directory. On the Modify panel, click the More button, then choose the Flex modifier and click OK. Play the animation in the viewport: a little too much squash and stretch! Change the Flex parameter down to about 0.2, and play the animation. The ball is automatically stretched by the movement along the path. You can adjust a path value to improve this. On the Motion panel, in the Path Options group, turn on Follow. While the animation is playing, try entering different values into the flex field. Also experiment with the Strength and Sway values. A good combination is a high strength (say 11) and a low sway (around 1). You can animate the Flex parameters to vary the effect. Another approach is to set all the keys yourself using a Stretch Modifier to distort the ball. You could squash the ball by putting a Xform Modifier on it and non-uniform scaling the gizmo. You could also squash the ball using free-form deformation (FFD) modifiers. Or you could use a Path Deform. Let's just say there are many many possibilities.

2. 3. 4.

5.

Next: Animating the Ping-Pong Ball with Dynamics