Week 14

Following a path.

This week I learnt how to animate objects to follow a path .
Firstly I used a sphere to follow a basic circle spline shape, to do this I created a sphere,



I then created a circle spline and placed this around the sphere,

I then selected ‘Animation’ from the top toolbar, then selected ‘constraints’ from the drop down menu then finally selected ‘Path constraints’


I then had to select my path, so to do this I clicked on the circular spline, this attached the sphere to the path I created from the spline.



I then rendered the animation and played it, it worked successfully with the sphere moving round the circular path as planned,

Here is a shot of the rendered AVI file being played with the ball moving around the path.

I then wanted to make a rectangle follow a wavy path, so I created my rectangle from the shapes toolbar and then I created my path using line spline.
I attached the rectangle shape to the line path the same as I did with the sphere and circle path. I then played the animation and the rectangle moved along the path, but not as I wanted, the rectangle stays at the same flat position whilst moving up and down gradients,

I wanted the rectangle to point down whilst going down a gradient and to point up whilst going up a up gradient, to do this I selected the box and opened up the ‘path parameters’ and used the ‘path options’ to select the ‘follow’ and ‘bank’ check boxes to get the box shape to follow the path how I wanted.

I then played around and used this technique to get a camera to orbit around a stationary object so that you can see all sides to the object.
To do this I created a teapot in the middle of the scene, I went to the ‘create’ toolbar, ‘geometry’, ‘standard primitives’ then selected ‘teapot’ and dragged it out onto my scene.
I then added a camera by using the ‘cameras’ tab under the ‘create’ menu. I selected target camera and dragged it out onto my scene pointing it at the teapot, I then added a circular spline to the scene same as I done before, then my scene looked like this,

I the selected the camera and got it to follow the path of the spline just like I done for the sphere, I then rendered this,

Here is a screenshot of the AVI file being played, this was also successful, and the camera orbited around the teapot on the circle spline whilst staying focused at the teapot.