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Written by Rawpulse
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Saturday, 28 January 2006 |
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A tutorial showing how to make the space ship turn with a motion guide.
We're going to look at a more advanced style of motion guides. As you may know from looking at our previous tutorial, Basic Motion Guides, we had problems with the direction the ship was facing. This tutorial will address this issue, and make the ship turn along the motion guide, to look more realistic. If you are new to motion guides, read that tutorial first.
Use the space ship from the previous tutorial, or draw a new one. If you want to make it better, you could draw some planets and make the background black to make it look more like space. If you decide to draw planets, do it on a seperate layer to the ship. Up the frame rate to around 20 frames per second via the Properties menu.
At this point, your stage should look something like this:
Now, add a guide layer and draw the path you want to ship to follow. I made the line go round all the planets. Add the space ship to the start and finish, to complete the motion guide. Now you will have your ship moving along the line. The ship always faces the same direction, even when turning, which is the problem we encountered. We're going to look at a way for the ship to rotate.
You will need to add a keyframe on the timeline at every point just before the ship approaches a turn in the motion guide, and just after a turn. If you have only a few turns in your motion guide, it will be easier. So, just before the first turn in your line, add a keyframe on the ship layer. Move forward a few frames on your timeline until the ship has passed the turn, and add another keyframe. Now select the keyframe after the turn, click on the ship, then go to Modify > Transform > then select Rotate 90 degrees whichever way to want it to turn. If the direction of the motion guide line is clockwise, rotate the ship 90 degrees CW. For this project, the line goes Counter Clockwise (CCW).
The images below will help to make this clearer.
Image 1 - At the first keyframe the the ship is before the turn:
Image 2 - The second keyframe, the ship is past the turn, and facing downwards because the ship is rotated:
Now it's just a matter of continuing this method throughout the motion guide, until the ship has rotated around each turn. it's a time consuming method, but the results are considerably better. Below are the final animations, both with the effect, and without.
Final Animation - Effect On
Final Animation - Effect Off
You can really see the difference. If you have problems with this tutorial, feel free to post in the KnowFlash.com forum about it.
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 28 January 2006 )
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