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Animate a Circular Path

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  • Software:Blender 2.78  ·
  • Difficulty:Beginner

Rules of the Exercise

  • 1
    Only 5 keyframes are used - prove this by enabling motion paths.
  • 2
    Submission video contains 5 loops of the animation.
  • 3
    Animation is as close to a perfect circle as possible.

Let's animate a circle! Easy....right?

OVERVIEW

This exercise is designed to be an application of the information learned in Chapter 1 of the Animation Bootcamp course. The point is to animate a sphere in a perfectly circular path using only 5 keyframes and the graph editor. What you will learn is how the f-curves of your keyframes can work together to generate smooth, clean animation. "Clean" as in it uses the least amount of keyframes as possible.

exercise_animate-circle-path_demo

INSTRUCTIONS

  1. Download the Animate a Circular Path: Source Files from the Downloads tab. Unzip and open the included .blend file with Blender.
  2. Using only 5 keyframes and their f-curves, animate the ball in a perfectly circle path around the world origin.
  3. Render your animation as an openGL viewport render loop. "Loop" means that the animation ends exactly how it begins so it can play seamlessly forever.
  4. Loop your animation 5 times and export as a video file.
  5. Upload your video to YouTube or Vimeo.
  6. Finally, submit your exercise by clicking the Submit Exercise button in the top-right corner of this page and pasting your video's URL.