Anim8or Community

Steve ---
I know what you mean.  My late wife and I visited in (ahem) 1992, and I fell in love with REAL Italian food.  We absolutely HAD to have our daily fix of espresso, gelato, and pasta!

How do I create textures?

Since your question was HOW to create (edit/alter) textures, not that you wanted someone else to do it, I recommend you look into something like IrfanView or XnView, both of which you can find for free.

I agree, regardless of the hedonistic nature of the object.

Just kidding, ronaldfarmer! Actually, it's often difficult to get 3D text to "look right."  I like the beveled edges, and the color scheme looks good, too.

Yes, indeed, it's a LightWave model:

It's not necessary to choose both parent and child.  The child should "tag along" with the parent's motion.  Conversely, you should be able to move the child independent of the parent.  If you sel;ect both and move, you may get results you're not after.  Did you see what I posted here?: http://www.anim8or.com/smf/index.php/topic,5281.0.html?

We were having some discussion on modeling for animation, and (properly) establishing parent/child relationships so that the animation workflow wouldn't be a nightmare, when I thought about working up this little animation.  I originally posted a portion of it on the General Anim8or Forum, but thought I'd add a bit to it and post the results here to see if there might be any questions about how to do something like this without pulling your hair out.

Mmmmm, not exactly, Owl.  But the important thing is that you achieved the results you were after, which is really all that matters!


OK, so let me expound just a bit on a generic approach to modeling, rendering, and animation, at least from my perspective.

It's important to "think ahead" about what it is you're trying to do.  A top-level, "composite object" model can be good for gathering ideas, but it doesn't provide the necessary flexibility when you want to modify one or more elements.  It's often better to treat your model like you would a model car or airplane --- as a bunch of individual piece parts that come together.  And of course, the approach you take to modeling also depends on whether you want something simple to convey an idea or something that looks convincing.

Creating a stick, box, or blob figure is relatively quick and easy to model and animate, and can be quite useful at conveying ideas and, because of how the brain "fills in" details, even emotions.

On the other hand, if you're modeling something organic, such as a face or a human body, in order to appear convincing, you need to mimic what a real face/body does: moving one portion of the mesh can affect another portion.  For instance, when you smile, it's not just your mouth that moves; your cheeks plump up, your ears move, creases appear below your eyes, wrinkles appear, your lips may part, revealing teeth.  These are not independent actions, but with careful modeling and --- in this case --- bone setup, you can control each action independently.

For non-organic models, such as your quad, it's best to keep the parts that move separate and independent from the parts that don't move, and then "build" the model and establish the parent-child relationships within your scene.  And, obviously, it's important to understand the relation between the parts that move and those that don't.  For instance, the props rotate and provide the lifting force to move the frame in real life, but they are fixed in place on the frame.  So in your animation scene, the frame is the parent of the prop, not the other way around.  And as I've said in a previous post, bones are great for organic models, but aren't necessary for "hard" objects.  X-Y-Z translations and Roll-Yaw-Pitch orientation should be adequate within the scene.

Likewise, the cage may rotate, but it is attached to the frame.  So, the frame is also the parent of the cage.  That is, you want the cage to follow the azimuth (right-left) motion of frame, but you want the cage to rotate in pitch and be independent from and have no effect on the frame pitch motion.

With more time and experience with Anim8or (or any other modeling package) these things have a way of becoming more apparent.  My basic recommendation to folks just starting out is to model fixed and movable piece parts as individual objects, and then "build" them in the scene.  I already said that though, didn't I.

Oh, and one final observation.  For any object that translates or rotates, make certain that, in Object Mode, you locate the rotational axis (axes) at the origin.  Otherwise, you're liable to get some weird motion in your scene that you will end up fighting.

Good luck and good Anim8ing...

You've got everything mashed up as object01.  I assume you want to parent the cage to the quad frame (object04).  In that case, you could simply copy the cage portion of object01 itself over to object04, and you should be good to go.  I tried it and it works. 

Now, if you want the cage to spin on that "rod," you'll need to make it a separate object, which you can then pull into your scene, still parent it to the frame, but now you can rotate it along the z-axis.

BTW, since your object is strictly a hard mechanism, not organic, it's really quite easy to animate without using bones or a motion sequence.  Though, I suppose bones helps when an object has multiple moving parts. and repeating a sequence in a scene might be a tad easier than copying and pasting frame data.  I would simply insert four instances of the blade object into the scene, position and parent them to the frame.  Virtually the same as you have in your figure, but this makes it much easier to alter individual elements.  Just an observation.

Interesting scene, BTW.