Animating a rotor on a helicopter

plan111

Hi.

I'm a very casual Daz user since I do mostly animations. I just purchased an helicopter and I want to animate the rotors. However, in the Posing Tab, The Rotate Blade parameter only goes to 360 degrees max. I tried typing in a higher value but it doesn't allow more than 360. That's enough if I want to animate one second or so, but if I want the animation to be longer, the rotor spins very slowly. So my question is: How do I animate this if I want the rotor to keep spinning for a few seconds? The same goes for car wheels, or basically anything that turns. I work mainly with iClone and I can input values higher than 360 there, so it's kind of a multiplier. If I need 10 seconds, I type 3600. I guess there has to be a way to do that in Daz too?

Thanks.

benniewoodell

Try going into the parameter settings for the rotation you want to rotate, click on the little wheel thingie in the far right of the box, and uncheck use limitations. You should be able to make it go as long as you want then! 

TimberWolf

The problem you'll face with this is not the rotation limits which can be solved as Bennie mentions above. The problem is that Studio does not do motion blur and your animations will look unrealistic. You might want to consider animating the blades in another application (Unreal does this well) or looking into buying a set of animations that roughly match the angle you want to do this animation. There are a fair few companies that will sell you rotor or prop animations that look good but, obviously, you'll have to match your scene to fit them which might not be suitable for what you want.

If the 360 degree animation is enough, why not just loop it if you need more time? I'm guessing you would already have considered this so:

No easy solution to this one unfortunately.

WendyLuvsCatz

or use 3Delight to render the blades

it does motion blur

benniewoodell

TimberWolf said:

The problem you'll face with this is not the rotation limits which can be solved as Bennie mentions above. The problem is that Studio does not do motion blur and your animations will look unrealistic. You might want to consider animating the blades in another application (Unreal does this well) or looking into buying a set of animations that roughly match the angle you want to do this animation. There are a fair few companies that will sell you rotor or prop animations that look good but, obviously, you'll have to match your scene to fit them which might not be suitable for what you want.

If the 360 degree animation is enough, why not just loop it if you need more time? I'm guessing you would already have considered this so:

No easy solution to this one unfortunately.

Ah yes, I wasn't even thinking of the motion blur effect. I don't know anything about 3Delight like Wendy mentioned, but you could try to throw the render into after effects and add pixel motion blur and play around with it. That might work but now that I'm thinking about the look of helicopter blades, it might not. Or maybe you could blur the spinning in AE and have one frame of just the blades placed over the rotating ones and rotate that slowly in AE. It works in my head but I might not be explaining this well enough. But yeah, other applications are probably better for what you're trying to do as a whole. 

PerttiA

There's also "Motion Blur for Iray" 
https://www.daz3d.com/motion-blur-for-iray
 

plan111

First, sorry for the late reply everybody, I thought I'd get an email notification whenever anyone replied to the thread. 

@benniewoodell, thanks, it's exactly what I wanted. @TimberWolf, I'll probably render in 3Delight anyway, iRay takes way too long and the animations don't really need to be photorealistic. 

Thanks everybody.