| Because of a recent request to show how one gets the head of R2 to swivel, I decided to put this little tute together. As always with a tutorial, this is just one way and may be neither the fastest nor best way, but it works and will help you get there with the demonstrated result. |
| 1. Open LW Layout (hit 'd' to set it up any way you like). 2. Download the R2 mesh and load it into Layout
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| 3. Select Objects and scroll to the layer with the dome (Layer 2, in this case). I raised it just to show the layer. |
| 4. Select rotate or just hit 'y' |
| 6. With the slider in the Frame zero position, enter 45 degrees next to the H, or simply drag the red arrow in the top-down view to where you want the head to go to (notice, I used 45 deg). 7.Now click on 'Create Key' and the Create Motion Key window pops up. Click on the (Rotation) 'H' and then 'ok'. 8. Move the slider to frame position 15. 9. Enter 0.00 degrees and the head will go back to center. Click on 'Create Key' and the Create Key window pops up again. The H will be already high-lighted, so just click on 'ok'. The window will show a 15 in the top field. Here is the table for all of the frame positions:
The pop-up window for frame 30 is shown below - just so you know what you're looking for: |
| 10. When you're finished, click on the play button (or move the slider) and watch the action: |
| 11. Now to render this baby. a) In the left upper corner select 'Window" and set your background color (default is black) b) Under the Render Tab, select Render Options and this is what I chose: |
| c) Under the Output Files tab in Render Options, select "Save RGB" the choose LW JPEG and a name e. g. R2_Anim. LW may pick the numbering scheme (you can change it). |
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d) Select your camera, and here is what I set up. NOTE; I changed AA to Low. You can see it is good enough. |
| e) Hit F10 - Waaaay too easy, isn't it? Notice that in Render Options, I selected only every other frame to be rendered (Render Frame Step '2') and that the size (Camera Properties) of the render is reduced to 50%. Ray recursion is set to 8 for quicker render. To produce the actual animated .gif file, I went to Corel (formerly Jasc) Paint Shop Pro. After I loaded the frames into Animation Shop (Part of Paint Shop Pro), I culled the animation yet again, down to just 16 frames and cropped it as well. As you can see, even those 16 frames are doing nicely. To
help even more, you may also download the scene file:
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In case of questions or comments, contact me (Karl Stocker - aka pixeltek) at pixeltek@yahoo.com
