Blender Underground

Sorry Darth. I assumed too much. I re-read my post and it is a bit vague. I'm glad you found another source but if you would have posted back a "Huh?!?!" I would have expanded considerably on what I said....

BTW, I still keep confusing you and Coyabbit for some darned reason. I have no idea why my Alzheimer's is kicking in that way....

Huh?!?!



(but seriously... could you perhaps elaborate on this? Please?? TIA )

Ok Damascus, Give me a moment and I'll have screencaps for you....

here is my submission for this week on youtube and here is a higher quality download

Damascus,

Here is how you do it.

First, I have a cube in "animation" mode. I inserted a keyframe at frame 1 (I Key->Rot).



I then moved to frame 200 and rotated the cube 180 degrees. Insert another rot keyframe. Since we are only working with the ZRot key it is safe to delete the XRot and YRot keys by selecting them in the IPO window (the colored buttons to the left of their description).



You can edit and move curves in the IPO window just like you can in the 3D window. I maximized the IPO window to show you. TAB itno edit mode for the IPO window and you will see the ZRot curve turn yellow providing you with handles to move the curve just the same as a bezier curve would move.



As a side note, when we rotated the cube in the positive direction, the curve went negative. This is because the curve represents rotation clockwise / counterclockwise. A positive rotation in the 3D window is clockwise movement hence negative curve.

Now all that you do is G KEY grab the bottom handle making sure you have the CENTER dot clicked. Constrain on the Y-Axis (Y KEY) and type in -360 to go exactly to -360 degrees.



We now have a cube that spins 360 degrees exactly once over a 200 frame animation. There are two problems with it though. First is that the cube will start off slowly and spin faster as we get closer to frame 100 then begin to slow down again as we approach frame 200. This is because of the curve type. To make the cube spin at a constant speed, we need to change the curve to be linear. Under the curve menu, go to "Interpolation Mode" and select "Linear". Your curve should get less curvy.



So this takes care of one rotation but what about if you wanted it to spin multiple times? The answer is to repeat the steps you did above which is time consuming. Blender has simplified that process. TAB back out of edit mode for the IPO window and go back to the curve menu. Make sure the ZRot curve is selected first. In the curve menu is "Extend Mode". If you choose "cyclic" it will repeat your curve over the entire life cycle of your animation no matter how many frames you have.



Since the curve now breaks up, it doesn't spin backwards on itself.

Well, nice screen shot penix1... there should not be anymore "Huh?!?!"(s) about this

and many thanks for the weekly challenge extension and .... thanks also for a little explication on how theses challenges works.

I'm really starting to see what can be done with nodes....

My first attempt at depth of field.



For some reason I can't get Yafray to render what the compositor does, so I have to use Blenders own renderer for this.

Sweet gravy, I did it!



In regards, when I rotated in the positive direction, my curve was positive as well (opposite of yours). So, not sure what's up with that. I rotated negative so my curve was displaying as yours is.

I also didn't know where the 'curves Button' was...
But I figured it out.

Thanks for taking the time to explain the process... Now I can fiddle with it and see how well I can beat my spinning cube into submission, muah-ha!

Whatever works on the direction. Mine has always been opposites so that's why I posted that blurb. If yours went positive, then instead of -360 you would type in simply 360. It would work the same after that either way. The key is to break up the curve so that it starts at 0 again on the next cycle. In short, only make cyclic one rotation! The minute you stat to go beyond one, you will reverse direction because Blender assumes the curve to connected.

Oh, and it was "curve menu" not button....If I said button, I apologize.

That's not fair... there were still a couple of 'Huh?!?!"'s for me... I'm still new to Blender and VERY new to animating anything

Ohh Boy, a challenge that corresponds with my latest wandering path of self education!

This is my work on trying to make both a fluid and a material that simulates whipped cream. It drips right, it compresses right, it is slightly elastic, it flies right, its splats right (in your face), it smears only OK no matter what I try though as Blender won't let you make a really thin smear layer using the fluid simulator. The material shows light through it when its the right thickness (SSS), although I did make it slightly transparent too as I thought it was more fun to watch this way.

http://www.veoh.com/videos/v16083500pYzs5SCg

I may need to re-render this cuz for some reason the world background looks way to close to my animation so its seems to whizzzzz by, sorry, I'm just learning this animation stuff, but for now, this shows off the effects I was trying to generated, I hope that you enjoy it, I sure did

wow, there's a lot of posts since 6am today

Penix, I bow to your superior might...and experience.

Walsh and allseeingeye: looking good!

Steve: Yes, nodes are very powerful indeed. They turn Blender from being "wow a cool, free 3d app" into: "Hmm, i can mix 2d, 3d, effects filters, still images and various plugins..."

there's nothing better than experiementing with a simple scene and a mammoth node setup. I honestly find that one of the most satisfying things about the compositor...

and you're correct: there is no way to amend your yafray renders. I'm not even sure if yafray supports multipass rendering - if it does, you could at least render all your passes as image sequences and mess about with them to your hearts content in the sequencer/compositor/ae...

In fact, i'm still looking for a decent blender to ae export script a la cinema 4d. if anyone knows anything about this, i'd be happy to hear from them.

Dan

That's what you get for missing staff meetings...

SteveCameron: that's cool. I have absolutely no idea how you did that, could you point me in the right direction?

OK I made a better background and a tweak in the lighting and re-rendered the whipped cream sim:
On Veoh:
http://www.veoh.com/videos/v1608585133D8appk

And, although its in worse resolution, I also made a link to it saved in YouTube :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B71J8BiiRQc