Animating Help?

[LaydeeDem]

I am still pretty new to animating. I have animated solar panels but the animation is very wobbly on close inspection. The animation was also very hard to make because I had to go in almost keyframe by keyframe to make it look right. I am currently using blender. Can anyone give me pointers on how to make cleaner animations?

[AdmiralStewart]

Did you use the record feature with auto keyframes? Also, you can switch to the F-Curve view - anything wobbly should show up as a very "noisy" line. You can PM me the blend file if you want.

[LaydeeDem]

Did you use the record feature with auto keyframes? Also, you can switch to the F-Curve view - anything wobbly should show up as a very "noisy" line. You can PM me the blend file if you want.

Alright, F curve's didn't do much use, what I mainly want to do is to simply animate something pivoting on a axis, seems simple, but the animation makes the part float off and heat to that point, instead of pivoting on an axis. I can animate, but you can see the horribleness if you look closely.

[vegany]

try perenting the panels so thay perent in a line so 1 to 2 to 3 to 4.... and so on. I did it with a animated leg.

[AdmiralStewart]

Alright, F curve's didn't do much use ... float off [...] instead of pivoting on an axis.

One more thing about the F Curves, you can use the editor to change the "interpolation type" from smooth to linear. Might help.

#1 If it is "floating off the axis" then you have three things to look at. The object origin is what it should rotate around. The other thing to look at is to make sure you are actually rotating around the object origin or around the 3D cursor.

#2 If it is floating off after being animated, then you first keyframe is not set correctly. You can try to use ctrl-A to apply rotation, location, and scale when you start on frame 1. I myself prefer to move to frame on, click record, select all, move 0, rotate 0, and scale 1. I find that I have a better starting point for setting up my actions (it gives me all 9 tracks on my keyfram/f curve/NLA/dopesheets).

#3 - This is probably where you are if you're reasonably decent at Blender but stuck on getting the part into KSP - Make sure that the origin is aligned with your "axis" or else Unity will not correctly accept the animation. Blender may animate it the way you want to see, but if your object origin is not aligned to your axis of rotation, Unity will have it animate way out of whack. Blenders object data includes an entire stack of transforms (movements and rotations) on objects and can interpolate between when your object transforms bounce from local space to world space. So far I've only found the object data being origin based - location on 3 axes, rotation 3 axes, (and maybe scaling on 3 axes, not sure) in Unity. There's probably a way to change the tracks in Unity to follow world space instead of local space, but you'd have to ask somebody who knows Unity.