13th March 2014; Duplicating special, inspired by grouping tutorial, then some animation with a camera and aim.

In this post, I will create a ship with several parts to it that will each animate separately. So I plan on creating sails, a sail shaft and a turbine at the back of the boat. All will be grouped together and then animated as one object. This idea was inspired by the grouping tutorial in my previous blog.

Above and below I have used duplicate special on the one blade I made, so when I edit the parent it will carry over to the duplicates.
Below I divided 360 by 5, and got the number I needed for the rotation input in the duplicate special window.

When I grouped the blades together the centre point of the group moved to the centre so I had to reset the centre point or it, which puts it in the middle of the group when I click the option (shown below).

Below I created a simple pipe part for the blades to circle around it. I added divisions to create an indent into the pipe.

I created a pole for the sails to animate around and the created the sail.

Below I am moving the centre point of the sail so that when I go to animate it will rotate from the pole.

I then grouped the sails with the pole and then set their rotation point to the centre of the pole.

Using a Camera and aim, I have been able to create a nice animation of the boat sailing past the camera, with the boat as the aim of the camera. 

In order to render this quickly I am going to create a playblast video, which quickly takes the frames from the timeline and uses them to create a mock-up scene animation.

I know of the playblast ability, but don't know how to use the feature, so I will look it up quickly.

Here is the tutorial I am following to use Playblast to render my scene.

at first I was having a problem with trying to find the setting for the playblast to render the camera's view, until I realised that I had to change the view in the editing mode to camera perspective for this to work.

I have added materials to the boat to make the movie a tad bit more interesting.

An important thing to do when doing a batch render is to make sure that the renumber frames option is ticked, otherwise the frame will save over themselves.

Below, an application opens up and it shows the progress of the rendering frames and them saving.

I have saved the final file on Disc