noob needs to animate

[LaFrance]

Ok, pardon the noobishness. can somebody layout the general process I need to go through to animate?
in particular, I have a camera over a planet. I'd like to animate it ever so slightly, with the camera's pivot point at the
planet's center, to simulate the planets rotation... or, if there is another, more elegant way.. please clue me in: I can't seem
to find much data on how to animate. (I was not a terragen .9 user, so, terranim and terranim2chan (sp?) aren't familiar to me..)

thanks for any help,

Brian

p.s. yep, like the new site. well done.

[rcallicotte]

What do you want to do in general terms?  Simulate the planet revolving? 

To move the camera, you just key frame each movement and proceed to the next.  There are ways to automate this process, but I haven't tried anything yet.  Actually, the animation module is in Planetside's queue to work on over the next year (I hope).

[LaFrance]

I've done some general translation... which is ok. I want to simulate orbiting the planet. The way to do that in an animation package is set the cameras pivot point to the origin of the planet, then rotate the camera. I can't seem to find any pivot points for the camera in the viewport, and none listed in its attribute/parameter editor window...

[rcallicotte]

Pivot points could be beyond the animation provided, but I might be mistaken.  I know Planetside has plans to enhance the animation module for us in the not too distant future.  Maybe Oshyan can confirm or explain better than I can.

If there are pivot points, I don't know about it.

[Oshyan]

There are buttons on the bottom of the 3D Preview which set the pivot point, etc. however I'm not sure how well this would translate into animation. It also only works on surfaces, so the pivot point would be the surface, not center of the planet. You could possibly fudge this by first setting the pivot point to a known location, then moving the planet center to that location...

- Oshyan

[LaFrance]

thanks


B