Blender Tutorial: Spin an object constantly

okay so it's been a while since i uh first made a tutorial on how to make a propeller like this um but someone has recently asked me how do i make it spin um so i'm gonna just demonstrate that quite quickly so i'm just gonna view it from the top here now at the moment the all the parts of this propeller are separate and as you can see um there we go so i want to join them up and the way i do that is i click one part then press shift to click another part keep your finger on shift click another part finger on shift click another part and uh now right click and click join and all those pieces have joined up and we've still got a nice central point here there we go when this person says spin i'm presuming that they mean um continuously spin but just in case they don't let me show you how to make something uh spin okay so uh what we do okay and we're just going to spin it in the z-axis so we're kind of looking down the z-axis is kind of imagine a spindle straight down through the middle and i know it is it is because it's on here um what we do click on the keyboard which is for rotate then click z for we're defining what the axis we're going to rotate in is and now i'm going to click zero and that's a starting point because it's just started saying this is the zero point there's no degrees in it okay i click enter and now i'm going to click i which means insert a keyframe and actually i don't want to i just want to insert the keyframe along the rotation up from rotation on rotation nothing else really um so i'm just going to move this this this on 30 frames it doesn't have to be 30 frames by the way um what i'm going to do now i'm going to click r and then z again defining the the axis rotation and then type in 360 for 360 degrees and then click i for insert keyframe and then click rotation there we go hopefully now you should see if i scroll that back that propeller is rotating 100 and sorry 360 degrees in 30 frames which actually would would transpire to be um about one second to be honest this props moving too fast but that doesn't matter for this demonstration um i envisaged this as being a large ship prop and so that certainly wouldn't rotate him it might rotate in one second i don't know but anyway here we go so that's one second now there's a slight thing wrong with this in that okay it's just rotating once and i'm presuming that anyone who wants to make a propeller move actually wants it to keep keep on spinning yeah so the way we do this is go into our um oops sorry go into our uh graph editor let's just make this a little bit bigger i have i just want to work in the zed access here so i'm clicking on z there i just want to shrink this down a bit use this kind of scale here on the side now what happens here this is um the default setting in blender is it it if something moves it kind of it almost makes it look like it's got inertia and breaks so it doesn't start it off at immediately the same speed it's going to go at and it doesn't it doesn't finish in a dead stop it kind of slows down um but if you want something to keep spinning actually what it's gonna it doesn't start slowly then speed up it doesn't start slowly and then speed up and then slow down again it obviously keeps spinning at a constant rate so to keep get spinning at constant rate all i'm going to do is um just highlight these things here if i right click now and do interpolation mode i'll put linear there we go and that's met that means it's it's just starting and stopping at a at a constant speed if you like um there we go so if i play that there you go kind of starts and a dead stop there we go okay so how do we make it keep spinning without without having to kind of um kind of redraw this line all the time imagine if we wanted to spin for a minute or so that would just be tedious and glorious and so what we do click the the zed access rotation button here with the graph thing um click n on the keyboard and this brings up a a different uh menu here okay and what we need to do now is a little modifier button here on the right hand side click modifier add modifier cycles there we go hey presto what has it done it is added a whole load of uh cycles afterwards it's basically repeated the first cycle and if we now cr click play we have a constantly rotating propeller or in fact a constant rotating anything depending on what you're what you're doing um and there we go now that's not quite the end to be honest i can show you something slightly different um because imagine if this is on the on a on a boat or a submarine or something like that well if you wanted to show that boat or submarine moving um you might have a the propeller would want to move um in the same direction as well and at the moment there's not you wouldn't be able to if i tried to shift if i tried to rotate the propeller on its own like that okay now click play you'll see it reverts back to its original kind of orientation so that's not very helpful if you're kind of moving an animated object so what we do or what i would do there may be another way around it i would basically add a a null and so i'm just going to click shift and a to add an object um i'll add an empty or backward null but add an empty uh cube it could be any of these by the way you can add just a circle or i'm going to add a cube you could add a point um there we go i'm just going to scale that up a bit there so let's just look at that from the side now just to keep things tidy um i will uh scale that in the z axis scale z there we go because i like to if i'm going to make some kind of object to contain something i don't like it to be overly big or anything like that there we go um that's that so what i want to do now is parent that propeller to this empty uh box the empty doesn't actually appear on any animation on when it's not rendered so if i just click that first click the object first and then click shift and then click the empty like so and then right click um parent i want to parent to the object there we go like so okay so i'm going to just click um play now like that and let's just stop it so now what i can do and and um i can if i just rotate um if i want to rotate the null object if i rotate that let's assume it's for argument's sake there we go and now i press play you can see how the propeller um continues rotating in in the in the same plane if you like as that null so you can do anything with that null shape there you could even animate that null if you wanted to so imagine if you're going to kind of if that submarine was kind of moving across the screen or going up and down or rotating like so uh this propeller would would continue to orientate itself and rotate about its own access in that direction like that and that's how we do it

Channel: rocknets

Views: 76,024

Keywords: Blender, 3d, animation, rotate, spin, object

Id: zTVkyDvdrrI

Length: 8min 20sec (500 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 27 2022