Problem rendering a basic animation-n00b.

Hey there folks,
I will start by apologizing if this is simple, or if I haven’t looked through the forums enough. I have been lurching my way around Blender for several days, and have made some progress, but have hit a wall.

(I have searched pretty much every english support site out there…they have provided many answers, but now I am stuck!)

Ok, here it is: I have a fairly simple logo which I transformed into a 3D logo. I created an animation of the logo flipping and twirling to fill the screen.

I would like to render this into an AVI for use in another video editing program.

When I try to render the animation, the only thing that renders is a small amount of text that is layered on the logo (The text was converted to a curve, which is what the rest of the logo is-4 curves).

I have tried fiddling with pretty much every render setting I can, and have tried as many different selection and material settings as I can. (The material should just be a basic flat colot-nothing fancy.)

So what the heck am I doing wrong?!

Thanks…

Okay,
I am still stuck on this…I could give more details, but maybe the blend file will inspire you…or maybe you will just laugh your asses off…

Anyhow, the file is hosted here:
http://www.freeflightvideomagazine.com/blender.html
right click…save…you might need to remove a .txt…

thanks if you can help.

1)Well you don’t have any lights in the scene, but you’ve turned on ‘Shadeless’ for the ‘video magazine’ text, which is why it’s rendering. So you can turn on Shadeless for the other materials, and they’ll render (after step 2 below … but IMO they look pretty crappy that way …, I get better results adding a light and leaving shadeless OFF)

2)The other two materials aren’t rendering because you have the Alpha turned all the way to 0.0 making them totally transparent :slight_smile: (It’s the A: field beside the RGB HSV DYN buttons under the Material tab.

Add a light, change those alpha’s to 1.00 and you’re good to go. You can keyframe the Alpha btw by hovering the mouse over the buttons panel with the Material buttons showing, and press “i” and choose Alpha from the popup.

I would also suggest that you parent all of your objects to an ‘empty’ (null) object, then disconnect the IPO curves from all the objects except the Empty (press the ‘X’ button in the IPO window beside the IPO name/dropdown).

As it stands now, you have IPO curves for all of your objects, which is fine if you’re just going to select all the objects and adjust the animation interactively (by moving the objects re-keying). But if you want to use the IPO editor or action editor to adjust the timing, it will be a major hassle updating all the curves. If you don’t want to parent to an empty … since the animation is all the same for all the objects, you can change their IPO curves so they’re all using the same curve from the IPO curve dropdown box
(i.e. “Obipo.001”).

Actually, you might want to keep the separate curves, … if you select each piece individually and randomly move / keyframe them, you can have the effect of all the pieces coming together at the end of the animation.

Mike

well, heck! that was easy, eh? so that’s what lamps are for!
Seriously, that was exactly what I needed. I am now able to play around more effectively with this!

One more question-why would I want to keyframe the alpha?

Thanks much! this has moved me forward quite a bit.

Actually I learned something new by looking at your file, i.e. that it’s possible to render without having lamps in the scene :slight_smile:

Just another effect available.

  • a light / t.v. gradually …or suddenly turning on

  • maybe could be used for an explosing effect ?

Do a search for alpha here, you’ll probably find a bunch more examples that I can’t think of :slight_smile:

Mike