Spaceship Fly-Over In BLENDER This is my first ever attempt at doing a Blender tutorial. I’m going to try to show how to create a short looping animation of us flying close over a spaceship. Think Luke Skywalker flying over the Death Star. I’m going to do this tutorial in two parts. In the first part I’m going to try to go into a lot of detail in order to make it very “newbie” friendly. I’ll try to explain what I’m doing in enough detail so that hopefully most everyone will be able to follow along. Having said that, this isn’t meant for someone who is opening Blender for the first time, but I do hope that folks with very basic skills should be able to it. By the end of the first part, I think we should be able to have a very decent animation. In the second part I’m going to go into a few other things that are probably more geared toward an intermediate user. These will mostly be using compositing nodes to add some effects, that I think improve the animation quite a bit, but aren’t vital to its creation. I’m not going to go into quite as much detail in part 2 as to how to do something, other than to say what I’m doing, and a few screenshots to show the setups. Okay then, let’s get started! Part 1 – Creating the animation. Open up Blender, delete the default cube and add a plane (spacebar, add, plane), and then scale it up 5x its original size. (S-key, 5, enter) Enter Edit mode and subdivide your plane 3 times. (Tab to enter edit mode, F9 for edit buttons, then click subdivide 3 times). Tab out of edit mode, and split your 3d screen about in half (move your cursor to the top of the 3d screen, where it borders the menu bar, until you see a double arrow, right click, and select “split area” and then left click, you can then “grab” this border and slide it to get the size you want), and then change one of the windows to a Scripts Window, (click the box at the bottom left of the 3d window, and then select the window type we want from the menu that shows up). Make sure that your plane is selected in the 3d window, then in the script window, Select Scripts>Mesh>Discombobulator.
A brief tutorial in 2 parts on how to do an animation using Blender 3D software of flying low over a space ship.
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Transcript
Spaceship Fly-Over
In BLENDER
This is my first ever attempt at doing a Blender tutorial. I’m going to try to show how to create a
short looping animation of us flying close over a spaceship. Think Luke Skywalker flying over
the Death Star.
I’m going to do this tutorial in two parts. In the first part I’m going to try to go into a lot of
detail in order to make it very “newbie” friendly. I’ll try to explain what I’m doing in enough
detail so that hopefully most everyone will be able to follow along. Having said that, this isn’t
meant for someone who is opening Blender for the first time, but I do hope that folks with very
basic skills should be able to it. By the end of the first part, I think we should be able to have a
very decent animation.
In the second part I’m going to go into a few other things that are probably more geared toward
an intermediate user. These will mostly be using compositing nodes to add some effects, that I
think improve the animation quite a bit, but aren’t vital to its creation. I’m not going to go into
quite as much detail in part 2 as to how to do something, other than to say what I’m doing, and a
few screenshots to show the setups.
Okay then, let’s get started!
Part 1 – Creating the animation.
Open up Blender, delete the default cube and add a plane (spacebar, add, plane), and then scale
it up 5x its original size. (S-key, 5, enter)
Enter Edit mode and subdivide your plane 3 times. (Tab to enter edit mode, F9 for edit buttons,
then click subdivide 3 times).
Tab out of edit mode, and split your 3d screen about in half (move your cursor to the top of the
3d screen, where it borders the menu bar, until you see a double arrow, right click, and select
“split area” and then left click, you can then “grab” this border and slide it to get the size you
want), and then change one of the windows to a Scripts Window, (click the box at the bottom
left of the 3d window, and then select the window type we want from the menu that shows up).
Make sure that your plane is selected in the 3d window, then in the script window, Select
Scripts>Mesh>Discombobulator.
We’ll make these changes to the discombobulator defaults.
Now press the “Discombobulate” button at the bottom.
The discombobulated mesh will magically appear in the 3d window. Move your cursor to the 3d
window, your new mesh should be selected, make sure it is, and scale it down along the “Z” axis
to 25% of its original height…(S-key, Z-key, .25, Enter)
We won’t need to use the script anymore, but we will need that window. So what I do is slide
the border on it over so that it is as small as it will go.
With your discombobulated mesh selected, duplicate it and move it 10 blender units along the Y
axis. (Shift+D, Y-key, 10, Enter).
To make things simpler lets name our 2 discombobulated planes. I’ll name the original ship1
and the duplicated one ship2. (One way to name a mesh is to press the “N” key while your
cursor is over a 3d window, this will bring up the transform properties panel, and you can then
type your new mesh name into the “OB” field. “OB” for object. You can also type in numbers
directly into the location, rotation and scale fields directly.)
It is important to have identical meshes here because we are making an animation that will loop,
so the mesh in the view at the end of the animation has to exactly match the view at the very
beginning.
It is probably a good idea to save your work here.
Now we need to set up the camera.
I am creating this animation to use as an animated .gif that I can use as a signature on a forum,
which causes quite a few limitations. We’ll get into a few more of these later. But since this is
planned as a sig, I wanted it really wide, but not very tall, so let’s set the camera rendering size
as 800x200. You can do that under the render windows (F10).
In my file, the mesh we named space1 is located at 0, 0, 0 coordinates, and space2 is located at
0, 10, 0. Make sure that yours matches this, so that the camera coordinates we are getting ready
to use will work too. (You can use the “transform properties” panel to type in these exact
coordinates if you need to.)
We want to place the camera so that it is close to the “spaceship” and angled down a little so the
sky doesn’t show up in any of the frames. This is to give the impression that this spaceship goes
on forever. For me this works out for the camera to be at location 0, -6.5, .6, and a rotation of
80, 0, 0.
Like so:
With the cursor over the 3d window, and the animation at Frame 1, press the I-key and select
“Loc” to insert a “location” key. Now change the animation frame to number 150. Move your
camera to location 0, 3.5, .6, and insert another “location” keyframe. These locations need to be
exact so that our animation will loop properly. (Instructions below on how to change the
animation frame numbers.)
(On my default Blender setup, I like to keep a “Timeline” window below my 3D window. That
makes it really easy to access specific frames in my animation, and to watch the animation. You
can create a timeline window the same way we created the Scripts window, just split the screen
horizontally instead of vertically, and then change the window type to “Timeline”.)
Like so:
Alrighty now. We’ve got to adjust the IPO curves for the camera animation so that it moves at
an even speed from start to finish. When you add keyframes in Blender, it defaults to a bezier
curve path, which means that the movement will start slow, speed up in the middle, and then
slow down towards the end. We need to change that so that it is a consistent speed from start to
finish, or else our looping animation won’t flow smoothly.
So to do that, take the window that we originally used to access the discombobulator script, drag
it over to expand it so that it is about half the available space, and change it to an IPO Curve
Editor window, the same way we changed it to a Scripts Window earlier.
With the camera selected you can see the IPO curve in the IPO window, make sure your cursor is
over the IPO window and press the A-key until all the curves are selected. Now press Tab to
enter edit mode for your IPO curves. Press “A” until you are sure that all the curves are selected,
and then press the “V” key. I don’t remember exactly what that stands for, but I know what it
does, it makes all the bezier curves into straight lines, and that makes the camera move at a
constant speed. Press tab to get out of edit mode in the IPO window, and now you can get rid of
that window. (Hover your cursor over the line dividing the two windows we made earlier, until
you see the double arrow, right click, select “join areas”, then left click on the window you are
getting rid of.)
Now, our first and last keyframes for our camera are at frame 1, and frame 150, and they should
look exactly the same in camera view, which will cause a little bit of a hiccup when we loop our
animation, so we need to change the final frame of our animation so that it will stop at frame
149. You can change the ending frame number, either in the Timeline window, or under the
“Animation” button in the Render buttons (F12). Make sure the start frame is “1” and the end
frame is “149”.
Like I said earlier, I am planning this animation to be an animated .gif file to use as a forum sig.
To do that I will host the image at a free image hosting site, and link it to the forum. Most image
hosting sites have a file size limitation of 1.5mb. I’ve found that to get a decent balance between
size and time, 5 seconds is about as long as I can make an animation without having to make it
really, really small. So that’s why I’ve made it 149 frames long.
Now would be a good time to save again.
Okay, we need to add a material to the spaceship. I’m going to use a material that I’ve
downloaded from the Blender Materials Repository. So go to the Blender Materials Repository
website and download the material called “Starship_Hull”.