Animate a ceiling fan

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hey All,

I’m working on a ceiling fan for a project and I was curious if there was a way to make it constantly spin without having to use keyframes? Weird right, well I just want it spinning throughout the animation at a constant speed, but I’m not sure how long the animation will be so it’s a bit of a pain to set keyframes at the start and end and then hope the interpolation is correct… etc. Is there a quick scripting solution or something like that I can use?

Thanks,

2

You could write a short script that rotates it based on the current frame, but it’s probably faster to just use extrapolation.

  1. Make sure the origin is at the center of fan.
  2. Go to frame 1
  3. Insert (i) keyframe loc/rot
  4. Go to frame 25
  5. Rotate on z ( r z ) however much it should rotate in 1 second
  6. insert keyframe loc/rot
  7. Switch to the graph editor.
  8. Key, Interpolation mode -> Linear
  9. Channel, extrapolation mode -> Linear

It will rotate with constant angular velocity forever. Switch back to 3-d view and scrub the timeline.

If you want to slow down/speed up. Go to frame 25 and r z more or less and insert a keyframe loc/rot.

3

There is a modifer in fcurve editor that alows a continuous loop. Use it a while back not sure exactly how it works, i think there some youtube videos.

4

cool, thanks all