Anyone made a Sprocket and Chain spinning?

[svetlik]

Anyone know how to cure the effect of an object spinning with increasing speed until it looks like its going in reverse? Like movies of propellers and wheels. Other than just slowing it down to a crawl.

Had tried to come up with a way of making the chain advance along a path using expressions but just animated the chain & sprockets separately. Thanks in advance.

[robcat2075]

This would be a great question for... Live Answer Time!

But we're not having Live Answer Time this week.  Happy Fourth!

Yours is the classic wagon wheel problem, the bane of every western stagecoach, generally known a "strobing"

There is no perfect solution for this, you mostly need to distract the viewer's eye from it.

In "Timing for Animation", Tom Sito gives advice similar to all the other animation books...

 

 

You need some large scale feature or texture that will not strobe. We don't have "dry brush" in 3D but we do have motion blur.

For this animation of a gear with small teeth, I have widely spaced spokes, a non-repeating texture and motion blur set to 100%.

The teeth still strobe but it is not painfully obvious.

We are fortunate that, in A:M, we can have 100% motion blur. A real film camera can only smear about 50%

Motion blur is best done with multi-pass. The number of passes you need to get an adequate blur depends on how far something moves on screen.

You're on the right track by including a discolored link. More of that, perhaps more subtly colored... and lots of blur.

On a separate note, it looks like you are using an environment map to create the chrome reflection effect. It is best to that to "Global axis" ON so it won't rotate with the object.