Props, as in planes

[jwalt]

Curious how you folks approach a spinning propeller on a plane? Here's what I have:



It looks alright, but I had to speed it up, via the gif timing, to get it to look like it does. When I was trying this stuff in Bryce, I usually just gave up and put a squashed sphere in place of the blades, then used a bumpy glass texture on the sphere. Any secrets you care to share? Anim8or model.

[cat]

How many frames are there? Can you show the animation frame by frame?

[Eric]

If it's just starting or stalling, you'd be able to see the blade, but I think the easier and more real looking method is to use motion lines on a white circle....

[jwalt]

@Cat

Nine frames in the animation, but thanks to your question I realized I really only needed four of them to get the same result:



Here are the frames:



I'm still having to run the gif faster than I think it should be.

@Eric

That's kind of what I was doing with the squashed sphere in Bryce.

Edit:

Also been working on this:



I need to add some bones for the feet, and I'm not happy with the feet, in general. I'm also having a devil of a time with the weight painting where the neck joins the breast; I can't seem to get rid of the ridge. I also should put more motion in the upper section of the wing. These are things I've noticed, Anything else? I wanted kind of a goofy looking bird.

[selmiak]

now that guy is cute

[Eric]

Interestingly, I only looked at this thread on my phone before. It looks much better on the desktop. On the phone, the blade is more apparent, and the spinning doesn't happen at an even frequency.

My new question is: is this guy a pelican, or a pelican't?

[jwalt]

@Selmiak

May be cute, but he's also being a pain in the butt. I made an error in Anim8or involving subdividing the mesh, lost the weight painting for the flight portion, and got to do it again.  Did get it back up in the air (see my avatar), but it was rougher the second time around, for some reason.



I'm working on the beak, which has generated a couple of questions.

Question the first: Anim8or key frames run the beak animation to 31 frames. Since the non-tweened walkcycles, at 8-9 frames, look okay, I'm guessing I could drop three out of four frames, adjust the timing, and still have a reasonable looking animation. Is this correct? Or, would I be better to leave it alone?

Question the second: I've figured out how to get an image out of Gimp with an alpha channel (transpartent background), but generating the gif with an alpha channel is proving harder. The output I get looks like ghosting, and is sequentially displaying all the images without deleting them. I'd guess I'm missing something in the process. Suggestions?

The beak is hard to weight paint because of the closeness of the two parts. I did get it done, close to my satisfaction, but you can disagree if you care too. And I did find out what "massaging the mesh means," another term that showed up in that Hexagon tutorial.

This is an Anim8or model.

[Scavenger]

Question the second: I've figured out how to get an image out of Gimp with an alpha channel (transpartent background), but generating the gif with an alpha channel is proving harder. The output I get looks like ghosting, and is sequentially displaying all the images without deleting them. I'd guess I'm missing something in the process. Suggestions?

GIF only supports 1-bit transparency, not full alpha transparency. You can make an animated PNG file, but I'm not sure how.

As for the bird, you may want to have a look at the line on the side of his beak, it looks like a rendering error - smooth that out before going too much further, or it'll look real ugly later on.

If I were doing it, I'd make a blendshape of what his mouth would look like fully open, then as you rotate the bone that opens his jaw, increase the influence of that blendshape. It'll help maintain the volume of the pouch he's got there and make it look a little more convincing.

Also, would you mind posting the low-poly wireframes, like before you subdivide, and the bones you're putting down? It might help us give you some tips on how to make more animatable models.

[jwalt]

@Scavenger Thanks for the feedback. That crease has been bothering me for a while. I'll see what I can do. I'm about ready to start over, anyway, since I've made numerous mistakes along the way, usually involving the subdivisions becoming permanent. I need to think about how to billow out the pouch beneath the beak, which I doubt I can do with what I've got going on here. Of course, I might get distracted by something else. I have a bad habit of chasing after shiny things.

Edit: Did a do-over on the bird. Got a better mouth. Began playing with a sequence, which led to this:



Mesh is pulling in different places, but still seemed pretty funny, to me.

[Galen]

Ideally you'd *probably* want a blurred wedge for the full motion blur effect (otherwise it's gonna not look right at a high enough spinning speed).
http://www.avsim.com/pages/0108/P40/Incorrect%20prop%20animation.jpg

That might still work with a solid colour instead of transparent edges (so a spinning gray wedge)

[jwalt]

@Galen - Thanks for that. The latest iteration of Anim8or has access to some glass textures, which I used for this:



Next time I tinker with props, I'll experiment with the wedges, too.