Total animation confusion

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi, I’m having a problem with some animation and I’m wondering if anyone could be nice enough to lend a hand. I am by NO means an artist or an animator, (I’m actually an aerospace engineer), so some of the lingo is foreign and plus all I have to go on are the tutorials. I’m making a segment of animation for my companies web commercial but I’m running into some problems.

My goal is to try to create air bubbles flowing down a pipe with red oil in it. I’ve modeled my bubble, I’ve set up my camera and my lighting and they’re perfect. I ran a trial simulation with 3 bubbles flowing down the pipe and I successfully made a AVI file of that. Now, I want to go back and add more bubbles and have bubbles generated in the middle of the animation. I go back to frame 1 and duplicate (shift +D) my original bubble and then scale some and move them around and by the end I have about 10 bubbles, (all duplicated from the original bubble). Then I keyframe the scale, position and size of all 10 bubbles and move to frame 11. I press the Up arrow and all the bubbles rescale themselves and move on top of the original bubble, (i.e. it looks like there is only 1 bubble in the frame). How do I stop this from happening?

This should be a simple animation but it’s turned out to be a frustrating nightmare. Can someone please tell me how to make my bubbles float down by pipe?

2

Ausco,

Welcome to the wonderful world of blender animation! :smiley: It seems that your problem lies in the fact that all the additional bubbles you created using shift-d are all still using (or are linked to) the the same IPO curve object used to create their motion. Remember, blender is very object-oriented, and IPO curves exist in blender as an object (just like mesh objects or material objects might exist.) Understanding and managing the links between these objects becomes very important. This can be more easily visualized by changing one of your view panels to display the outliner, then selecting the “view” -> “show Oops Schematic” menu option. Spend some time in this view to become familiar with blender’s object-oriented nature.

What you will need to do in your situation is to select each bubble object in turn (you can more easily select them within an outliner panel set to “outliner view”) and once selected, visit the IPO curve editor panel and click the little up/down arrow icon next to a box in that panel’s header that (likely) reads: “IP:ObIpo”. This brings up a little menu in which is the option “ADD NEW”. When clicked this will create a new IPO curve data block that is an exact duplicate of the current one, but with a new name, that is now linked to your currently selected bubble object.

Note that its always good practice to name all your scene objects appropriately, and this is also true for IPO curve objects. (The text that appears in the box described above is editable to names that are meaningful to you.) Helps a bunch to pick back up when you come back to your project at a later time.

Repeat this operation for each of your bubble objects in turn. Once each bubble object is linked to its own IPO data block object, the curves of each can be edited, or the keyframes can be re-set, as desired. (A handy tip for moving entire keys is to hit the k-key within the IPO curve editor panel. This allows you to select and move entire keys along the timeline.)

Another way of animating your bubbles is the have them follow path curves (these can be added to your scene via the spacebar->add combo.) Simply parent your bubble objects to the path of choice to have it follow along over time. Take a peek at the wiki to find out more about how to manipulate path curves.

Hope this helps! Cheers…