Hi All
I am creating a Nieuport 17 Biplane model but i can not find a good tutorial on Propellor animation if any one has any ideas or links to relevant tutorials it would be greatly appreciated
Like do you mean how to model it or how to make it spin? For animation it is pretty simple. Just parent the prop to the plane so it will always stay with it. And then And then just use the “ROT” animation IPO to make it spin. If you have any more questions feel free to ask! Good luck!
The way I make things rotate normally, is to set the number of frames to 50, which can be done in the render panel. Then select the item you want to animate, set the scene to frame 1, put the item in its starting position, and hit the “I” key which will bring up a menu. Select “Rot”. Now, go to frame 25. Spin the item half-way through its rotation, hit “I” again, and select “Rot”. Now, open up your IPO curve window with the item selected. Select the curve that looks someone like a hill or slide (there should only be one curve that looks like that if you did this right). Go to the menu at the bottom of that window and select Curve -> Interpolation Mode -> Linear. The curve should no longer be a curve now but a straight line. Now go to Curve -> Extend -> Cyclic Extrapolation. This should extend the curve in both directions. Adjusting the steepness of the curve angle will adjust the speed of rotation.
That should do it. If you need pics just ask! 
Cheers,
John
Aircraft propellors spin way to fast for ZapperJet or Dudebot13’s advice to be of much use. A spinning aircraft propellor looks like a blurry, partly transparent disk, and has to be modeled that way. It need not actually rotate at all, unless you are showing an animation of the propellor just starting to spin, or winding down after landing. In that case, you’ll need to study films of actual prop aircraft to see what you will need to do to make it look realistic.
I’m not aware of any tutorials, per se, but it’s really a modeling issue, not an animation issue.
Adding Vector-Blur to the prop will make it look as though it was moving fast.
Cheers,
John
Vector Blur is useful for a lot of things, unfortunately making a realistic moving propellor isn’t one of them.
Actual photographs of flying prop aircraft. The propellor appears to be a transparent, slightly blurry disk.
With an extremely slow prop, or an extremely high speed camera, you might see sections of the disk
Hi everyone
Yes the problem i faced was not the animation as such but the blurry disk effect created by a fast prop.
I like your video clip zapperjet but i would probably use that when the plane starts up and then switch to a transparent disk. does anyone know how this could be done switching between a prop animation and a transparent disk?
Put both the rotating propeller and the transparent disk in place, and set the transparent disk’s alpha to zero. As the propeller speeds up, lower it’s alpha (making it less visible) while you turn up the alpha on the disk. As the speed increases, lower the prop alpha all the way to zero (making the prop invisible) and turn up the disk alpha to whatever looks best.
If you make the switch over six or seven frames it should look pretty realistic, especially if you’ve got revving up engine noise to explain the visual action.
And don’t forget to rotate the disk! While it does blur, it also looks like it rotates. 