Hi folks, I need to create a continuous spinning animation of an object, one complete revolution will do, I’ll then export it and re-run the clip to give a continuous spin.
What is the easiest way to achieve this? I can run a path for a camera, or spin the object, the most important thing is that the ‘end > beginning’ is perfectly smooth.
What would you folks suggest? If you say spin the object, what’s the best way to do this?
Thanks.
Using a path for the camera should work fine (gives a smoother result than trying to keyframe camera position). Parenting to an empty and having the empty spin, or simply spinning the object is fine too.
As for the seamless loop? Have the beginning and end of the animation in the same spot. Just make the animation one frame longer than needed, but delete the extra frame before stitching frames into the animation.
To spin the object with no acceleration or deceleration, go to the Graph Editor (F-Curve mode) and set the Keyframe Interpolation type to “Linear” it is “Bezier” by default - if you cannot see the right side menu in Graph Editor press your N key.
Or you can use a Driver to spin an object, so if you want to rotate an object about its Z axis, RMB click the Z rotation transform box, select “Insert Single Driver” then open Graph Editor in “Driver” mode, make sure you can see the right menu, set the Driver type to scripted expression and key something like: (frame - 1) /10 - this will rotate the object one Radian every 20 frames starting at frame 1. To rotate it exactly one revolution every 20 frames the expression would be ((frame - 1) * 2 * pi) / 20 to start it rotating at frame 10 the expression would be ((frame - 10) * pi) / 10 (I have simplified it form the version that is easier to explain - I hope this all makes sense!
Note! all rotations in drivers are in Radians and there are 2 * pi radians in a full circle. You don’t need to remember that pi = 3.1418, because Blender knows “pi” when you put it in a driver.
Frame related rotations spin uniformly with no acceleration or deceleration phase so are good for continuous spinning, but also note what @pauljs75 has written above about deleting the last frame of a sequence when you repeat it. You could incidentally render out the animation as a series of images, rather than a video file (generally very good practice) then assemble the single images in the Video Sequence Editor of Blender in a new blank project, then just repeat the frames sequence over again, then re-render the whole lot as a video file - this is a very quick process.
EDIT:
Here’s an example of two sets of image sequences added to the VSE - I then added an audio file for the overall sound for this project - there are no meshes in this project, just pre-rendered image files and a sound file.
Cheers, Clock.
