Animate a Circular Path

This Exercise is part of the course: Blender Animation Bootcamp

Part of the Learning Flow:

Animation in Blender

Chapter 1: Developing Your Eye
Learning to animate is learning to see.
Chapter 2: Everything is a Bouncing Ball
Complex animation is a collection of its simple animations. And those simple animations can almost always be analyzed as bouncing balls.
Chapter 3: More Ball Animation Goodness
Not so fast - I'm not done teaching you everything there is learn from bouncing balls!
Chapter 4: Let's not forget Squash & Stretch
This is the last chapter focusing on ball animation. Who knew there was so much to learn from balls?
Chapter 5: Into the Character Realm
We're diving into characters at this point. In this chapter, we cover one more animation principle and introduce you to the VonnBots!
Chapter 6: Can you walk the walk?
Summon all your animation skills to create believable and appealing walk cycles for the Stomp and Rivet VonnBots.
Chapter 7: In Closing
Congrats on finishing the course! If you're wondering where to go from here, this video from Wayne answers that question.
- What Next? 2 min

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Software: Blender 2.78
Difficulty:

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.

INSTRUCTIONS

Download the Animate a Circular Path: Source Files from the Downloads tab. Unzip and open the included .blend file with Blender.
Using only 5 keyframes and their f-curves, animate the ball in a perfectly circle path around the world origin.
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.
Loop your animation 5 times and export as a video file.
Upload your video to YouTube or Vimeo.
Finally, submit your exercise by clicking the Submit Exercise button in the top-right corner of this page and pasting your video's URL.

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.

How To make the animation loop?

1 answer · asked November 25, 2017 6:12am

sufyan-radin
1 answer · asked November 25, 2017 6:12am

How To make the animation loop?

Hey there, i want to submit this exercise. but i'm having trouble how to loop the circular path 5 time

1 Answer
p

How to show motion path in render?

4 answers · asked August 23, 2017 8:26pm

p

Perry Greene
4 answers · asked August 23, 2017 8:26pm

How to show motion path in render?

I dont know why but I cant find out how to make my render show the motion path. I watched all of the videos in bootcamp leading up to this exercise twice and I've googled it a thousand different ways and I'm stumped again.....I guess I'm idiot since Im the only one that cant figure it out. Someone told me where to find it in my first failed exercise submission but after I deleted it I couldnt go back and view the responses. Didnt know that they would be lost forever.

4 Answers
g

Why does my Object continue to spin?

3 answers · asked February 8, 2018 2:01am

g

grayblack83
3 answers · asked February 8, 2018 2:01am

Why does my Object continue to spin?

I have continued working on this section by elaborating on the number of spinning objects and making them rotate at different speeds. I am trying to understand why my animation works the way it does.
My Setup: 2 objects\balls
Ball 1: 81 Frames, 10 frames between each Key Frame
Ball 2: 121 Frames, 15 frames between each Key Frame
Length of animation: 480 Frames Total
My question, why does my animation continue to spin my objects when I have not added anymore frames beyond Frame 121? I thought that the animation would stop at the last key frame. Is this the result of applying the Cycles modifier within the Dopesheet?
Video of animation below:
https://youtu.be/T_SygZfwkQ0

3 Answers
z

It's not letting me download the exercise :(

5 answers · asked November 7, 2017 9:23pm

z

Zach Zellman
5 answers · asked November 7, 2017 9:23pm

It's not letting me download the exercise :(

5 Answers
s

Is there a way to see motion paths around an armature?

1 answer · asked April 2, 2018 5:22pm

s

sethdeming
1 answer · asked April 2, 2018 5:22pm

Is there a way to see motion paths around an armature?

After using Rigify, I'll calculate the motion paths as described, but the all appear right under the main control for the character even though his limbs and torso is moving.

1 Answer

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Wayne Dixon

Level 8

Rank: 6

Since 2009, I have been producing high quality character animations for everything from commercials to children's music videos. Working remotely for several small studios, I have been responsible for the rigging and animation of several videos that have received over 100 million views on Youtube. (Making for some very happy clients.)