I made this good 'ol clip of a helicopter so I could practice holding the camera steady.
But then I was like, hey, nice helicopter, I wonder how to make the rotors spin? You, blenderartists.org is where I’m turning.
Suppose you were only doing the one lap, like in the video, and you wanted to spin the rotors while the helicopter was moving, would you have to make all kinds of keyframes and move them by hand each time? Shirley not.
Working with the ipo curve editor (2.49) now called the graph editor (2.5x) you have an option for extrapolation mode for each curve - setting this to linear makes the curves continue on changing values at a constant rate.
Two keys at say 90 degrees rotation to define the speed of rotation can then be extended out to continue rotating.
For other tricks try searching for tutorials that show animating a car wheel.
I like the sound of that! I’ve been looking for a reason to need the IPO thing…
Man, I screwed it all up.
I got the IPO thing to work, but extrapolation linear didn’t do anything. I used extend cyclic and that made them spin, but then whenever the helicopter would bank or fly the propellers started freaking out on all the axes. Like spinning plates. Lucky I don’t know how to turn that gravity thing on or my boys woulda crashed!
I keep trying to parent the propellers to the body, but then they keep trying to center on it or swing wildly when it moves. Can you get them on a rotation, and then transform the rotation of that object along with the transformations of another object (the body of the helicopter)? Sound simple? There’s probably a button for it. Where is it? I’m sure I do not know.
That IPO editor comes in real handy for rounding up errant keyframes!
Ok, I think I’ve got a handle on it…
Thanks LoopyShane for the suggestions. After watching some video tutorials, I eventually stumbled on this topic, where they had the same question as me! I used both your advice, but I finally had to go (in the IPO Editor) to curve->extend mode->cyclic extrapolation to get the effect I wanted.
You know what else I was doing that was stoopid? I would mark one keyframe for my propeller rotation, then on the next one I would hit r for rotate, and z for the z-axis, but then I would just sling my mouse around some instead of making it exactly 90º. I think that explains a lot about my earlier wobble! Thanks for your help.
I used two particle emitters to simulate dust being stirred up on takeoff and landing.
I get the feeling that Blender is software that, when used properly, can perform whatever the user wants it to do. I find that in my case I am still kind of being pushed around by the software and compromising what I want to do with what I’m able to do…
Not so much what you are able to do but what you know how to do.
That’s the thing with a lot of software users (not just blender I’m sure) you do something the way you can figure out how - but there is often an easier way that you don’t know about.
Just with animation - you can make a few different actions and layer them together in the nla editor - if you don’t know that then you may animate the entire sequence as one piece unique to that scene, instead of a collection of common pieces that can be combined in multiple scenes.
/me is unaware of the nla editor’s existence or purpose…
Put basically you setup the keyframes for an “action” in the action editor (2.49) which is now called the dopesheet in 2.5x, so you may have an action called walking and another called waving, then in the nla editor you can say from frame 10 repeat the walking action 20 times, and from frame 60 start the waving action - the motion from the second action will be ‘merged’ on top of the other so the walk cycle continues un-interrupted while the wave cycle is merged in with it.
The second half of Dragon part 9 covers actions and the nla - and continues in part 10