Animations is used a lot in Design. Usually with a simple turn, but through paths as well. I'll do paths later though, as for this one I just want to make a simple looping animation. Which I'll turn into a GIF file. These kind of loops are usually only for models to show a 360 degree view, which you sometimes see in games. Here's an example.
So we'll start with making one cube, sphere or other object you want. It won't matter per se, as it's just a visual guide. I'd suggest either cubes or spheres though. I'm going to use Cubes, as they're slightly harder to work with and I've seen a slight example of what I want it to become.
1) My Cube will be thinner than how it is now though. I won't shrink it because I want to use a camera anyway. Might as well place one already. I'll just slide the X-size to 50.
2) Next I'm going into top view, making the next steps easier. I follow this up by dragging the Cube up the Z-axis by 250cm.
3) Now I'll make a circle of Cubes, which can be done really fast. Simple make a duplicate of the Cube by holding CTRL and dragging the cube. This new Cube will be at -250cm.
4) Making it easier and faster, I'll just select both Cubes, go to my Rotation tool and hold CTRL again to duplicate both. And I'll repeat this until I have the amount I want. With Shift you can get a clean 90 degree turn, and 30 degrees afterwards. I'll go on till I have 12 Cubes in total, positioned as below.
5) Next up are the textures. I want to go for a rainbow circle animation, so I'll make 12 different colours. The only changes I make on these materials are the colour and selecting the Glow. Inside the Glow all I'm doing is selecting the "Use Material Color" option.
6) I'll join all Cubes in a Null object, which will make the animation easier to make. I'll place the camera in front of the cubes now, and I'll add the [link]white background as well. With a Sky object for the background.
7) The upcoming steps are Good as equal for everyone, no matter what objects or textures you're using. I prefer to use PAL settings, which is 25 fps. So we'll go to Project Settings to change that.
8) Now we have 3 seconds on the timeline, which will be enough, but not enough. We'll want some time before and after, which we'll need to make the animation smooth. So right above the Material bar, we'll make the 0 a -15 just in case, and the 75 a 90. Every 15 seconds on the timeline I'll rotate the Null 90 degrees, lock it with the Key symbol and move on to the next 15 seconds.
Now that that's done, we'll be going in the Render Settings.
9) The Frame Range will be the only thing to change here, as I won't meddle with the ratio. That's fine for now and won't matter at all. The ratio I will set will be 15 to 74. The first and last frames tend to slow down automatically and there is a fix for that, however I'll leave that for a differnt tutorial. The 75th frame is the exact same as frame 15 and We don't want to slow the animation down even 1 frame, which is why we cut it down one frame.
Anti-Alias will be set to Best just in case. And we'll be adding a Global Illumination, which will bring the colours in a better contrast this time.
10) Now we'll just render it! Pick a location to save it. I prefer to save it as a TIFF Format, as those easily load into After Effects.
11) The rendering might take a while, depending on what you made and how heavy it is on your computer. While it's rendering you could take a break or read on ahead. Once that finishes we'll have several separate frames, we just need to put them together. That's why I'll open After Effects and import the files.
12) Drag them in to load them in the scene of course.
13) Now when you play it, you can see it runs just how it did in Cinema. However to make the movement smoother, I'll add a blur. A directional blur. This'll make the entire animation a bit prettier in my eye.
14) You'll notice the sides are slightly faded black now from the blur. Which might ruin the image, depending what background you're using. In this case, it does. The most simple fix is to just put a Solid under the frames
15) In the solid settings you can select the pipette and pick any colour on-screen. In this case, the background. Fun fact, After Effects will automatically name the colour as well to what it is. Apparently the background I'm using is a Pale Royal Blue.
16) Drag the Solid below the frames and you're done. Now all you need is Export the file to an AVI clip and we'll open up Photoshop to turn it into a .gif.
17) Import the videofile, which you can find under File > Import > Video File to Layers. Photoshop won't let me printscreen this part, so I'll have to guide it this way. Just select the video, let it load and load in the entire thing.
18) As a final step we want to Save for Web. Thanks to the size, it'll look worse when I zoom out to get the entire picture in screen. That's not a big deal in the end, just a zoom thing so don't worry if that happens. The quality will obviously be lower than the original of course. But the settings should already be for the best possible settings, or close to that. If not, try to match the ones I've got. Simply save it as Images Only and you're done! This is what it turned out to be for me.
As you can see, I got the result I wanted. The loop is infinite and smooth. You can do this for anything you'd like, as long as you make sure the loop is closed. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! If there are any questions, feel free to comment.
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