Noob Question

Artistic Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi all!

Started on Blender recently from a background in Lightwave. Trying to do a simple animation of an advent calender, with certain ‘windows’ opening and having images/videos on plains behind each window, so it looks like each window opens to show a certain video or image. When I create a shape key and edit it to rotate it fully open, rotating from the 3d cursor all looks fine in the edit mode. However when I put the value up in object mode the rotation looks strange, the ‘window’ seems to shrink towards the 3d cursor rotation point mid rotation. Any idea’s on where I am going wrong?

I am also having insane troubles getting a basic image map onto the front of the calender. Everytime I upload the Image it stretches and I cannot find any easy solutions (like reversing axis rotations). It’s ridiculously frustrating as I know it’s a simple task and I am probably overlooking the obvious, as it was fairly simple (and limited) in LW.

Cheers

Jamie

2

Shape keys will move vertices along the most direct route from one position to another. So if you are positioning a door as ‘open’ , then ‘closed’ the shape key doesn’t know there’s should be a nice arc, it just moves the vertices in a straight line and that causes the mesh to deform. To create a consistent movement need to create an armature for each door, or manually move vertices along the path you want the shape keys to take.

3

Thanks for the reply TCooper. I have used the armatures to open the windows and also tried it with standard keyframing, not as ideal but it done the job :slight_smile: