Animating turret lasers

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi,

I’ve been wanting to do a space scene with guns and all, and well so far my blender skills hadn’t been up to the task, but lately I’ve been picking up more and more stuff here and there as well as improving myself in modeling (or so I think anyway).

So I decided to take a quick look at a basic turret scene, with lasers (which are basically a modified version of the light saber tutorial somewhere on these forums).

So after say 10-15 min max I ended up with this :
http://www.mediafire.com/?4mljxt1ay5c

Like I said its basic, but its gets the idea through. No in this video, the turret only fires once, which isn’t fun at all (and it has the big problem of not being able to go up nor down only sideways but we don’t care for now).

So I was thinking of way to fire many shots without having to crowd my scene with a huge amount of objects. I thought of using the array modifier and empties (although I’m not sure it would work because I took the four lines and grouped them together) and using that but I’m unsure as to whether or not it would give a nice result.

So basically I’m looking for suggestions on how to fire multiple shots without too much trouble.

Thank you in advance, Borg

P.S: Yes I know I couldve used only 2 lines and used the mirror modifier and offset the second pair, and probably an array modifier on top of that, but like I said I’m not sure arrays are the way to go.

2

Heres another one i did using only one laser mesh. It took a pretty long while though.

http://www.mediafire.com/?amg0mxd3opd

3

Two ideas come to mind for the multiple shots you’re after. In the action editor, you could do do a select followed by a Shift-D for the keys where you’re making your shots. Then just hit the G key and drag your extra shots to wherever you want them.

Alternatively, I hear the NLA editor is good at dealing with cyclic / repeating motions. I don’t know very much about that but I’m sure there’s some decent docs that might help you there.

4

Thanks, I’ll look into that I hadn’t heard of either of these features.

5

You can use particle physics to generate your light saber photon blast mesh as particles see (you need Real Player installed) : http://media.ase.tufts.edu:8080/ramgen/DR21/ObjectsAsParticles.rm

Follow the basics of the video tutorial and just create an object with just one vertex and make that the emitter for the light saber photon blast mesh and just play with the settings …

The video tutorial is by Neal Hirsig who uses Blender to teach 3D at Tufts University … he’s got a whole raft of them here (all in rm format … though I believe there is someone who has ported them and in downloadable format) : http://ocw.tufts.edu/Content/28/supplementarymaterial/366743

6

Holy crap thanks for those links, that list of videos looks quite instructive! :slight_smile: