How do you animate on a circular path?

Retired Products Animate General Discussion
1

Hey Campers,
I ran into a snag while working on a new tut.
How do you animate on a circular path? For more details into what I am looking for, check out my Jing:
http://screencast.com/t/lkoMRZH9

Thanks Tony Ross, tonyteach.com

2

The easiest thing would be attach it to a peg and rotate the peg.

3

Thanks
OK, so if the object to rotate is a rectangle, and not a circle…
and, I want the rectangle to stay horizontal the whole time…
Picture a car on a ferris wheel, it rotates, but stays upright

Would a peg still work?

4

Not directly because it would be rotating around the centre point.

I don’t have animate on my macbook but I will have a play later since I have some ideas for a solution but I need to test :slight_smile:

5

Cool, Thanks.

6

My original suggestion would work if you also rotated the object 360 degrees for every rotation.

I can’t remember if you can use a line as an animation path but I think you can, I just can’t remember how since I never use it!

7

Raider’s right! Attach a Peg to the drawing, place the Peg’s pivot point at the center of the circle path and set the rotation. Then, rotate the drawing layer–the rectangle–to go from 0 to 359 after which you’re back to 0. Then you can cycle it if you need to.

8

Thanks Raider & Zebtoonz,
I will try those out. I did find another solution by parenting my rectangle(s) to a center rectangle.
I have a new Premium Tutorial in the works… the bicycle :slight_smile:
Take a look
http://screencast.com/t/r0QMsuzR8E

9

Cool! Bicycles are hard to do! I had to do one not too long ago and one of the things I did was to make each pedal and foot one piece. It sure helped him keep his feet on the pedals and in synch–ha! Then I just matched up the legs to connect with the feet.

10

lol, yeah I thought about doing that foot-pedal thing, and still might. This is actually gonna help me put out a couple of rotation tips and tuts. I’ll keep y’all posted… currently pondering a choo-choo :slight_smile:

11

i might do a quick tutorial of the method Zeb and i discussed. It sounds complicated, but it is actually really easy.

I so need to get back into making tutorials, I have a list of stuff to do!

12

Hey Campers,
Perhaps a tutorial challenge? Not a who’s the best kind of thing, but more of a "I butter my bread this way."

Maybe every month there is a challenge, like the current rotation thing we’ve been talking about, then all the tut-gurus knock out a Jing showing how they would solve it.

Thoughts??

lmk
Tony

13

haha :slight_smile: That sounds like fun but I only make tutorials when I get a little spare time cause I am non-pro (mine are all free!). This makes committing to anything really hard for me(since paid stuff always comes first).

But I feel that I owe the community some new ones because it has been ages cause of my ios apps. I actually have a few ready to record (like bubbles with harmony) but just been too busy to record :frowning:

I am certainly not in competetion with you :smiley:

14

lol, OK, so maybe “challenge” was the wrong word. I’d love to make mine all free, but, recently my day-job and I mutually decided to see other people… So I have more time than money currently, lol.

OK, so the FREE portion of the rotation thing, I will post on the Better Than Flash blog, and will send a note here when I do, and I invite you all (if you have the time) to respond with your recipes in kind.

How’s that ?? :slight_smile:

15

I will post mine too on the blog and try to do it in the next couple of days :slight_smile:

I am all for a sense of community and would love to try to get back to being active in the tutorial making.

I don’t view selling as bad since it generally means higher output of tutorials, longer tutorials and higher quaility. I have often thought about selling some so that I can use it to support the free ones (thus making more regularly) but honestly I don’t have the business skills or time to set everything up.

I try to avoid tutorials that have been done, i just liked this cause it was interesting, and the way i am describing really sucks in text and sounds hard!

PS I just noticed the post counts are broken since you have clearly made more than 1 post :slight_smile:

16

The suggestions everyone brought up here are great! I just want to point out that also when you use a 3D path, you can mouse over the path and hit P and it will create a control point. This is more in relation to what you originally recorded the video with, Tony, but it might be easier than using keyframes.

~Lilly