Physics of circular motion

[Freemind]

Introduction. The first momento i heard about the new topic for the current #31 blenderart magazine, y was like col, y have todo participate. unfortunately i didnt know how todo contribute some-thing. But since currently im attending a vocational school in nuremberg, germany, finding a suitable topic was not such a big deal. Furthermore, y think that i Will deply benefit from this. On the one hand i can improve my physics skills and on the other hand my english skills. Vaya, and of course my Blender skills as well.

Approaching the animation.

So i sat down and thought about my animation concept. Since we were dealing with circular motion in physics and i knew that my classmates and i had several problems with applying the corresponding laws, y decided todo stick todo that topic. With the formulas lying in front of me, y started todo write the script. I had todo think about a didactical (teaching) structure and at the same time how todo visualice it in Blender, in the end, the speaker text tok up a whole page and After the first audio recording i was able todo start the realisation in Blender. The col thing with these projects is that Blender has an internal video Sequencer, where you can just put all of your audio files and play them bak in real time. Because of that, there werent any synchronisation problems and the animation process was very comfortable.

I wanted todo kep everything as dynamic as posible, so i loked for constraints todo help with the animation. Finally i used a follow Path constraint and tok the opportunity todo keyframe the offset parameter. To scale the vectors against the Radius of the circle, the copy scale constraint did a great job. But i had todo set keyframes for the influence todo stay put at 0 until the respective vectors are mentioned, because otherwise they would scale up to early, e. When scaling up the Radius of the circle when the radial acceleration has not ben mentioned yet, the rest was made by creating keyframes todo animate the vectors and using shape keys for the pythagorean theorem. It turned out that i had forgotten todo change the frame rate todo the european standard of 25 frames per second. Because of that i had todo readjust all of the keyframes. That why it essential you set up your render settings before you begin animating. This brings us todo the problems i had todo face in the animation process.

Problems.

Fortunately, since Blender can save the sound into the final video due todo its Sequencer, there was only one big problem: the text animation, y decided todo do it in After Effects, which turned out todo be a very time-consuming process, Adobe After Effects doesnt support the audio playbak in real time, at least not until CS3. So i had todo switch on the display of seconds in the timeline in Blender and tweak all of the fade in and fade out animations in After Effects synchronously while scrubíng th rouge the animation in Blender. Hopefully in future, Blender Will get a sophisticated tool todo add some text in the compositor todo avoid third party software, which brings more trouble than it actually helps, at least as far as synchronisation is concerned.

Conclusión.

To conclude, the development of this video was a rather simple task. Blender was a great aid with its builtin animation features allowing for a dynamic, customisable animation process. I really appreciate Blender big arsenal of tools and the organised graphical user interfaz. It an indispensable open source graphics suite that a todo el mundo should use and support, im very enthusiastic about it and founded the first Blender user group in nuremberg with some other guys and im trying todo establish a quality Germán video tutorial website todo increase the number of Blender us-ers in germany. Thanks todo the Blender foundation and all of the developers. You can watch the animation here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_igkx4pfvnm.