Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/06/15/time-to-animate-my-3d-animation-but-what-on-earth-is-a-motion-curve/

My animation is starting to look like something rather than just a selection of sketches, meshes and good intentions; so now it’s time to see if I can make it move. If not then all of this effort will have been for nothing. My first port of call was, as usual, Noob to Pro’s superb Blender documentation but with admirable honesty it admitted that it’s own section on animation was a bit hurried and suggested this explanation of animation on Blender instead. Animation of Undeformed Objects .It all sounds great in practice – if a bit geeky and gobbledygooky.

One problem was, for example, that I followed the instructions for creating an “IPO” (an “interpolation wave” apparently, or basically the two ends of the path I want the mesh of my cat’s head to move along) but after I had hit the recommended buttons nothing changed. In fact it wasn’t till I started reading this Blender Wiki 3D animation document that I even worked out that I had to change the usual Blender display before I could even see an “IPO”.

Once I had created my short test animation (hurrah!) my problems were not over. Blender being Blender didn’t tell me where it had put the completed QuickTime movie file. I searched the internet for a page that would give me a clue and of course found one. Here is a great simple page about saving Blender animations.

Now all I had to do was upload it to my blog and make it available to all those iPhone using web surfers who have QuickTime embedded, at least I think they probably do. This page gave me some QuickTime/Blog integration tips, but I didn’t bother with the quick tabs it talks about because I use Windows Live Writer to compose my posts.