Hi everybody, I have been playing around with Blender for a while and have picked up loads of info from this and other boards.
This is my first real render/animation and have run into a problem concerning the looping of the animation. The blades start off slowly and then slow down and stop before the animation starts over, is there any way I can make the blades turn at the same speed continuously?
My second question is how do I render it so it can be played in Windows media player, my book says that I can render it as a .mov file but I do not have this option in the format selection so I had to use QuickTime.
The blend file is too large to upload so I have put up a picture to help understand.
Select the blade, set the window to an IPO editor and change the curve Interpolation and Extend modes to give a linear slope.
To get the turbines to spin continuously check out this post:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=191573
As to rendering it out, you should be able to use AVICodec to produce a file WMP can play. Two notes on this - 1st you should always render out to a lossless image format (.png for example) then combine the images in the Video Sequence Editor. Why? If it takes hours to render your animation and something happens - computer crash, power outage, etc, you would have to restart from the beginning, using the render to images method allows you to restart rendering at the last rendered frame.
2nd, you can render out the video to AVIRaw which will give you an extremely large video file, then encode it using something like virtualdub to something like the xvid codec.
Oh, one other thought, WMP is really a poor video player, try something like VLC media player that can handle almost any video type.
Randy
Thanks very much.