Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/09/10/back-to-the-blender-manual-this-time-animation-basic-tools-specifically-those-all-important-ipo-curves/

  After hours of work I’m happy with where the grass (done in Blender with particles) and the clouds (same) are at. In fact I’m happy with the whole effect of the animation’s landscape. It’s a nice mixture of cartoon and realistic and Blender renders it quickly enough to animate. My pretty clouds even move from a camera left to camera right under their own steam without the particles doing anything crazy, rendering nicely every time and looking 3D. I even added the titles, and it’s almost time to move on and do some proper animation of the actual story, but…

Those titles look a little odd. Up to now, to make something disappear from one of my 3D animations I have simply been whisking it off to level 2 to prevent it being rendered at all. This is easy and works well, but there is a bit of a visual jar; one moment the titles are there, the next gone. It would be much better if they faded out.

The only problem was that I couldn’t set this from the usual dialog box, luckily I found the answer here Doc:Manual/Animation/Basic/Tools/Ipo Curves and Keyframes – BlenderWiki, specifically…

To set an Ipo Curve for these channels, select the channel and then create control points via Ctrl LMB clicking in the Ipo Window.

Now I all I had to do was append the Caramel Cat of the title – a mesh I created earlier – into my beautifully rendered new background with fading titles. I started by reading an explanation in Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Creating Blender Libraries – Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks, but when I tried it didn’t work.

Don’t you just hate it when that happens. I know for a fact that thousands of people append items to Blender files all over the world every day, but I couldn’t work out what I was doing wrong.

It turns out all I needed was a real idiot’s guide to appending, with pictures and absolutely everything spelled out in words of one syllable. And I found one http://download.blender.org/documentation/oldsite/oldsite.blender3d.org/142_Blender%20tutorial%20Append.html written by a guy who really gets how dumb your average user can be, and I don’t mind admitting it.

After reading this tutorial about appending meshes I worked out that the meshes I wanted were actually objects and once I started appending from the object library of the blend file instead everything went smoothly. My cat can now frolic amongst the computer generated hills of my animated background to its little heart’s content.