3D WORKSHOP -
Introduction
by- Adam Kalisz
The first moment I heard about the new topic for the current #31 BlenderArt Magazine, I was like 'Cool, I have to participate!' Unfortunately I didn't know how to contribute something. But since currently I'm attending a vocational school in Nuremberg, Germany, finding a suitable topic was not such a big deal. Furthermore, I think that I will deeply benefit from this. On the one hand I can improve my physics skills and on the other hand my English skills. Ah, and of course my Blender skills as well! ;)
Approaching the animation So I sat down and thought about my animation concept. Since we were dealing with circular motion in physics and I knew that my classmates and I had several problems with applying the corresponding laws, I decided to stick to that topic. With the formulas lying in front of me, I started to write the script. I had to think about a didactical (teaching) structure and at the same time how to visualize it in Blender. In the end, the speaker text took up a whole page and after the first audio recording I was able to start the realisation in Blender. The cool thing with these projects is that Blender has an internal video sequencer, where you can just put all of your audio files and play them back in real time. Because of that, there weren't any synchronisation problems and the animation process was very comfortable. I wanted to keep everything as dynamic as possible, so I looked for constraints to help with the anima-
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Physics of Circular Motion tion. Finally I used a 'Follow Path' constraint and took the opportunity to keyframe the offset parameter. To scale the vectors against the radius of the circle, the 'Copy Scale' constraint did a great job. But I had to set keyframes for the influence to stay put at 0 until the respective vectors are mentioned, because otherwise they would scale up too early, e.g. when scaling up the radius of the circle when the radial acceleration has not been mentioned yet. The rest was made by creating keyframes to animate the vectors and using shape keys for the Pythagorean theorem. It turned out that I had forgotten to change the frame rate to the European standard of 25 frames per second. Because of that I had to readjust all of the keyframes. That's why it's essential you set up your render settings before you begin animating. This brings us to the problems I had to face in the animation process.
Problems Fortunately, since Blender can save the sound into the final video due to its sequencer, there was only one big problem: The text animation.
Issue 31 | Dec 2010 - "Under the Microscope"