Hello

The following simple animation takes advantage of a previous thread on making objects emit light. (though it's not necessary in terms of learning to animate)

In animating, it is important to realize that Blender uses KeyFrames. We set objects where we want them and then "lock" those positions with KeyFrames. The Blender software will cleanly do all the tweening to get the in-between frames.

When setting KeyFrames, there are various properties that can be tweened. You'll want to select the minimum number that you need. You can set (among other things) the object's Location, Rotation, and Scale.

In the animation below, I merely set the location of the objects in the scene and then (at frame 1) Set a KeyFrame for the pyramid. At frame 61, I took the same object and put -360° rotation on the Z axis, and set another KeyFrame.

Why frame 61? I wanted a 60 frame anim that looped smoothly. I could either calculate the exact spin (354° for frame 60) OR, I can set the full spin for one frame more than the animation and then it always works smoothly. (ie. letting Blender do the math)

Now, what about those spheres? Well, I of course didn't want to have to animate those separately (though that's not difficult), but since they are following the spinning pyramid, I clicked on each (with shift, in order to select all three) and then (while still holding shift) selected the pyramid. The pyramid, being the last selected, is the active object. Pressing Ctrl-P sets the three spheres to be children of the pyramid. Whatever I do to the pyramid, also happens to the three spheres. Simply connecting the spheres to the pyramid in this way, makes the spheres rotate around the same center that the pyramid rotates about.

The last step, since I want this to rotate uniformly... ie. NOT ease into and out of the animation, which is the default... is to go to the Graph editor after having the KeyFrames set and just choosing Linear Interpolation.

After this, I merely animated the frames and made a quick animated GIF out of them.

This really only took moments. The rendering the frames for the animation took longer than the scene set-up and it still was pretty fast.

Enjoy... hope this gives some ideas for the future and also that it helps in understanding the basics of animating in Blender.


James