Create turntable animations in Alias

00:00

There are two ways to set up a turntable animation.

00:04

The first is to rotate the camera so the whole scene is turned.

00:10

And the second one is to rotate objects, so the scene remains stationary, and then either all or a selected object gets turned.

00:22

So, start by just zooming in to frame the car, and then choosing the Turntable tool.

00:30

I get quite a quick revolution, and if I click in the window, it stops wherever it happens to have got to.

00:39

So, I can get a bit more control over this if I set up a starting view, and then in the Turntable go to the Options and choose Restore Position.

00:51

And that means whenever I click to stop the animation, it will come back to the starting view.

00:56

Another thing I can do is slow it down by increasing the frame rate.

01:01

And then I get a slower presentation of the car, and when I click in the window, it'll go back to my starting view.

01:10

So, the way in which the animation is positioned in the window by default is determined by the bounding box.

01:19

So, it's the bounding box center that gets positioned in the middle of the view.

01:25

If I want to change that, I've got a couple of options.

01:28

I can center on the grid origin, so you can see that's now in the middle.

01:34

But the option that gets in the most control is to use the object's pivot point.

01:38

So, I've grouped this,

01:40

and I can move the pivot to where I want the center of the rotation to be on the car, so let's put it up there to start with;

01:50

and choose the Average pivot option.

01:53

That now puts my pivot point in the center of the screen.

01:57

So, I probably need to move that down a little bit to get the result I want.

02:02

Let's zoom in, shade that out, and see if that gives me a more controlled result.

02:09

So just by adjusting that pivot point, I can control the positioning of the turntable in my view.

02:22

And finally, if you have other geometry in the scene, then selection becomes important.

02:27

So, if nothing is selected, then with both the Average pivot and the Bounding Box options,

02:34

all the geometry is included in the calculation for the center of the turntable.

02:39

And this applies even if the geometry is not visible on the screen.

02:48

So in this case, if you only want the calculation to be done on the object that's visible,

02:54

you need to do a pick object to select it, and then that will be used for the center of the rotation.