I’m pretty new to all this Blender stuff. I’ve had Blender for about a month, and only in the last week have I begun fiddling with it, and only in the last two days have I actually started using it to draw stuff. So, anyway, what I wanted to use it for to begin with was to draw some 3D starship graphics for some game out there that doesn’t exist yet. I’ve got the ship drawing part down pat (almost), but I have absolutely no idea how to setup the camera to do what I want, which is to get snapshots of the same ship from about 45 degree angle in 16 to 32 directions that form a complete circle around the ship.
Now, I tried using the, err, Information Finder Goodie (forgot what it’s called), but too much stuff comes up and I’m too new to know what’s what, so if someone could point me to a tutorial or give me some instructions on how to do what I want, that’d be terrific.
Do you want the camera to be circiling the think to get a view of all sides, or do you want a picture of it above rotated about 15 degrees? I am common with this method of making sprites move in games… Simply get a picture of it once from above, move it into a graphics program, and then rotate and copy…there is a ship rotator out there that you can use that does it all for you but I don’t remember where
If you want 32 pictures, that can fake a realtime turn of your ship, there are two different methods. Either turn the camera (the lighting will stay put,) or turn the ship. The results will be different.
I´ll explain with a blank file…
start blender. select everything with akey and delete it. Save your file. use ctrl-wkey often.
go to frontview with numpad-1key.
place the curor on the grid with shift-skey (cursor-grid).
add a surface-donut (for the ship), add a camera, add an empty.
press f9key. name the empty.
don´t move the cursor. press numpad-3key.
move the camera (with ctrl-key) on the grid to the left.
Keep one height with the empty. you can use middlemouse instead of ctrl.
your cursor should still be on the empty. press dotkey.
now rotate the camera with ctrl to an angle of 45 degrees.
select the camera and shift-select the empty. press ctrl-pkey
if you want to place the camera more freely, do this:
select the camera and go to the constraint buttons.
add a trackto-constraint. give it the name of the empty.
now you can move the camera with ease.
go to top-view with numpad-7key.
in frame one, select the empty and press ikey. use ‘rot’
for a 32-turn, go 9 frames up with rightarrowkey.
rotate the empty with skey and ctrl 90 degrees.
split the window. make one an Ipo-window.
select the RotZ-curve and press the button with an arrow pointing to the upper right corner to set the extend-mode to extrapolation. now the rotation should be infinite and smooth (a straight line).
add a light somewhere.
press f10key. set the start-button to 1and the end-button to 32.
activate ‘extensions’
as fileformat select Jpeg or targa, quality 100 percent.
set path and filename in the leftmost field. default is ‘//render/’ type in something like ‘//rotate/fullturn’
you will get 32 pictures.
hit ‘anim’.
version two (rotate the ship): everything the same, but do not parent the camera to the empty, parent the entire ship to the empty. this looks more common, because the lighting does not seem to rotate with the ship.
