Quick and Painless Turntable Presentations with Blender!

what's up guys i am mr cheeves and in this short video i want to show you how to put together quick turntable presentations for your models let's hop into blender and get started first off let's do some camera work there's a simple three-step process to a turntable like this step one add in an empty object and place it where you want the camera to rotate around step two add in your camera and clear its rotation with alt r then rotate it 90 degrees and move it out so it's directly facing your model then parent it to that aforementioned empty step 3 add in a rotation keyframe to the empty on frame 1 and open up this transform menu with the n key go to the frame you want your turntable to end on and change the z rotation to 360 degrees adding in another rotation keyframe step 3.5 select the first keyframe and press t to change its interpolation selecting linear and set the animation and frame to the frame before you want your turntable to end making this loop seamless there we go extremely simple and customizable turntable without needing to use curves or tracking constraints if you want to move this around you can just rotate the camera on a local axis and that will easily allow you to move the empty up and down and get different angles on your model the next part to this turntable is to add in a floor for our model to be standing on this part of the process is pretty subjective because well a lot of it is up to personal preference but of course this wouldn't be a high quality awesome tutorial if i didn't show you some options the first and most simple method is to add in an object such as a pedestal for your model to sit on for this i add in a cylinder and do some quick extruding as for materials i'll frequently do something reflective because i find that that looks pretty awesome there is one drawback to using a pedestal as it takes up extra screen space not letting you get as close to your model if you try to include the full pedestal in the turntable as well and if you say screw that and move the camera in any way it can result in the pedestal clipping off awkwardly at the bottom of the screen so what else can we do well alternatively we can add in a plane so our model gets some shadows on the ground and scale it up till it takes up everything i have done this on occasion but it can get a little bit weird because of how big you'll have to scale that plane so i usually use a different method with nodes if we head to the node editor we can do some simple editing to make this plane only appear in the middle we'll need to make a new material and add in a transparent shader and a mix shader then we can connect these nodes up with the principled bsdf in the bottom socket and all we need now is something to use as a factor the gradient node is a great option if we add that in and set it to spherical and then add in a texture coordinate plugging the object output into the vector of the gradient then we can get a bit of a result to adjust this we'll want a color ramp once we add that in between the gradient texture and the mix shader we can slide these handles and it will adjust the size and intensity of the shader mixing giving us a nice little circle in the middle of our plane the great thing about this is that we can plug anything into this other input like shaders textures or just even displacement stuff and it will just fade away if you want the idea of there being an infinite floor to still exist you can use your plane to only render shadows with the shadow catcher option under this visibility menu this will only work in the cyclos render engine though and then one last method that i sometimes use is to create a quick studio backdrop add in a plane and scale it a bit in edit mode and then select these back two edges and extrude up then we can select these edges bevel it with ctrl b and increase the amount of divisions here with the scroll wheel back in object mode we can select this backdrop and parent it to the same empty as the camera and head to camera view to line everything up this way the backdrop will rotate with the camera so it won't obscure your lighting or modeling but it will still be there in the background no matter what angle pretty freaking dope if i do say so myself the last thing i want to touch on for these turntables is lighting a problem i faced before is that the lighting will look good from one angle but will completely fall apart when the camera spins around behind the model i've actually started parenting the lighting to the empty as well to avoid this problem and so i don't have to check and tweak the lighting from every angle of course it is still viable to light your turntable without having the lights rotate with the camera just make sure that you preview it from all angles and that you don't make any of the lights too intense otherwise it will look absolutely horrible from that angle if you make any amazing renders using some of these tricks then go ahead and link to those in the comments down below also if you want to help out this channel like the video and subscribe and if you're feeling so inclined go ahead and check out my patreon for some exclusive blender files which you can find at the first link in the description thank you all for watching and have a great day

Channel: Mr. Cheebs

Views: 19,924

Keywords: blender, blender 2.8, 3d, animation, tutorial, rendering

Id: MidSiQrzg7Y

Length: 5min 49sec (349 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020