Planets or something similar...

just playing with Blender.

I'm not 100% satisfied though.
- the red sphere has a pronounced seam on it
- the animation stops and then restarts - whereas I would like it to play without the interruption.

http://www.guybuytaert.net/gif/planets.gif

It's kind of cool though!

Hello Guy,

I like your animation. You are being ambitious and I consider that a good thing...it forces accelerated learning.

With the two spheres, you can still see the object geometry (ie. that it is faceted). You need to select the spheres and turn smoothing on. You also, while each one is selected in OBJ mode, should likely press ctrl-2 to give it a Level 2 Subsurf modifier that will smooth those Planets right out.

Re: Pronounced seam...

There are two ways that stand out. Since you rotate the planet with the seam, we can't just hide it on the far side. You need to bring that texture into Xara and make it relatively seamless. (color down the seam with cloned parts from the image so that the seam virtually disappears) The second method is to repeat the texture, but to make it a mirror texture. (this is the lesser of the two solutions as your eyes will likely still be able to see that it is too symmetrical along the edge. The best way is the first choice to rework the original texture so that there is no hard seam.

Re: Start and Stop

This is because Blender normally wants all animated properties to smoothly EASE IN and EASE OUT. For this planetary motion, you don't want that, since planets don't do that. ;) Go to your Blend with the animation and go to the Graph editor. There is an option there, under Channel, for Extrapolation mode. Turn that to Linear and those curves (responsible for the ease in and ease out) will become lines and the animation will cycle smoothly. For your steam engine anim, easing is what you wanted... it starts from stop...accelerates... decelerates ... then stops. For fans, propellers, planets, spinning logos...anything that just is spinning with no acceleration/deceleration, you must manually choose Linear to get the right motion.

Hope this helps!

James

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ODdOnLifeItself

Hope this helps!

James

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Absolutely - thanks, James :)

Hello Guy

One other thing...

When you make a cyclic animation, of something rotating, revolving, etc.; then you normally have the 1st and last frame alike, when setting up the anim. This is a mistake.

There are several ways around it.

My favorite way is to just give Blender one extra frame for where I put the Keyframe. So, if I have 59 frames that I want, I just have to go to the 60th frame for the Keyframe and make whatever is spinning or revolving to 360°. Since the animation only goes to 59, it makes the perfect step back to the 1st frame to make the 360°. When you do it this way, changing things all around still leaves it working. If you do the calculated method, ie. 360° / 60 frames = 6°/frame. So at the 59th frame, you could put 354° and accomplish the same thing as the +1 method. But why do the math and why have to redo it if you change the length of the anim?

If you're using another program to assemble frames into an anim, then it's a moot point. You can just set the 360° for the correct number of frames + 1 and then omit the last rendered image from the anim build.

Hope this helps!

James

Version 2

http://www.guybuytaert.net/gif/planets2.gif

time to go back to the tutorials for something new...

I like that and I learned a lot from James' replies!

Very cool Guy, I like that. Glad you reworked it, much better now.

That looks very nice. I like it a lot!

Way to go, Guy

James

Thanks Frances, Larry and James for the encouragement