Subject: Re: Spinning an Object
From: Joe Angell <[email-masked]>
To: Keith Lea <[email-masked]>
Cc: LightWave Mailing List <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 1995 03:40:00 -0500 (EST)

I think I know how to do what you want to do (I have also used Imagine,
and besides some design problems, it's pretty damn nice -- I prefer LW,
though :) )  I got this one from the Humanoid set (and probobly something
in LWPro):

Take your null and parent the torque and main rotors to it.  Parent that
to the Helicopter.

decide how quickly you want the blades to spin.  If you want the main
rotor to spin once every 10 frames (kinda slow for a chopper), go to frame
10, set the rotation in the heading axis to 360, and make a key there.  Do
the same for the torque rotor (If the rotors are going to speed up/slow
down, you might want to make them do so in relation to each other.  I
think the torgue goes faster than the main, but no one'll really care
unless they test-fly the things).

NOW -- go to the motion graph for the rotor (or hit m).  Click on REPEAT
for the end behavior.  Here's what this does:

Frame 0 is ignored. The reason:  After rotating 360ø in frame 10, it would
be back to 0ø in frame 0 -- they're the SAME.  LW skips frame 0 to make
this easy for you.  Frame one starts the objects behavior, which then
continues to frame 10.  If you had it set to Stop, the animation would
stop there (I forget what reset does...).  Repeat tells it to go back to
frame 1 (NOT frame 0) and start over again.  By changing the Frame Offset
value, you can adjust when the cycle will start (as you can for the Image
Sequences).  AS you can see, this is a very powerful tool.  the Humanoid
set uses it so you can have a person take 3000 steps without having to set
30000 keys.

Hope this helps...

-- Joe