I have been looking at rigs on youtube for more rigging inspiration.
At 5 minutes through this tutorial the author mentions how a slider controls procedural animation of the engine.
I am not a python coder, and I am under the impression you have to write code to do this.
Is python the only way to create procedural driven animation?
Thank you for all of your help. You all have been amazing.
No, you could just by using IPO drivers get a “procedural” effect … The single driver/slider could be use to speed up the fan/rev up the engine faster or slower/animate the exhaust system . Most of the drivers would be easily accessed with an action constraint linked to a proxy which is driven by the slider, some would be easy like a direct Rot driver for the fan via the slider …
The only thing you would need python for is the slider he had for low res to high res …
Hey Vertex Pusher, thanks for your help again. You are truly an awesome forum member.
I don’t understand how you can use an IPO driver to drive something like a spinning fan.
How could you turn it on and off, and change it’s speed during animation through an IPO driver?
Thank you for all of your help.
Just like you limit the influence curve on a constraint … start at zero rot (stop) and add a couple of more points/keys to speed it up along the slider … at least for the starting/revving up portion … changing constant (real, not faked) speed could be done by having multiple fans that fade in/out with different rotations via layers or the alpha value … or you could just fake the high speed blurring fan with animated textures of various speeds … All of the above curves mapped to a point in the slider that sets it off/on …
Tricky to do but it’s possible …
I think I am beginning to grasp this concept. Are you saying make the rotation animation in the ipo curve editor and then drive it with the time channel?
Yes you could do that too . But I was thinking that you could have multiple fan objects located in the same spot that have its layer or alpha animated (or it’s texture) … Since unfortunately you can only have one driver per curve in Blender, a kludge like that should work .
I am basically thinking of the slider as a sort of time line … and animating along actual frames can be just as “procedural” and trigger any number of events - mapping that to slider coordinates is not that difficult .
Grant you using python could be more efficient since you could easily map a location on a slider to an acceleration of an object … though with something that blurs while in motion (like fans, props, etc.) isn’t possible actually in CG with “actual” rotational values, so you’ll wind up using a texture mapped object to fake it eventually …
Thanks for your help. Python sounds like my best bet although I am not a programmer.