Helicopter Rotors

[Tomuk]

Hi! All,

Can anyone help?

I am trying to recreate helicopter rotors rotating on the horizontal but I am having no success, I can get something of an effect by using a vertical png file and rotating it at a speed of knots in PZR editor (5#8u) but it’s not very realistic looking, any suggestions you might have would be most welcome.

Tom.

[thedom]

Tom,

Could you please post your project.

I'm quite sure it will give us ideas to try to improve it if we see what it looks like right now...

[Tomuk]

Not sure what angle you are displaying the helicopter. Maybe if you use a radial blur (if you have photoshop) it will help?

Tom

Hi! Tom,

Thanks for replying,

Yes I have Photoshop and yes I know all the tricks on how to put movement into a still image.

What I am looking for is a way to reproduce whirling rotors in P2e PZR editor in 5#8u.

The Whirling rotors must be horizontal as the Helicopter pans across the screen from left to right.

I hope I am making myself clear on what I am looking for, I just wish I had a web site that I could host a P2e file, and post a link here for downloading.

Any help you can give will be of help, The Dom is already on the case for me, I’m sure he will provide the answer.

If you would let me know you E-addie I will e-mail the P2e file to you.

Tom.

[Ken Cox]

TOM

put file in a zip and put it on

dropload

http://www.dropload.com/

yousendit

http://www.yousendit.com/

or set up a yahoo briefcase acct -- Hawk and Ken Nickels uploads demos on yahoo briefcase quite regulary

http://briefcase.yahoo.com/bc//home

then you tell who you want to get file to go to your yahoo briefcase acct and download it

with my yahoo acct i am limited to 25 - 30 mb

but think hawk's has a larger acct -- his isp is connected to yahoo

ken

[Tomuk]

Hi! Ken.

I have taken your advice and registered with Dropload, they don't provide for leaving a link to your file on forums,or do they?.

As far as I can see, every thing is done by e-mail and for that you need to know e-mail addies.

The only wnsoft forum members e-mail addie I have is the Doms as he sent it to me.

By using this method of contacting you,I believe you will be able to see my addie,please let me have any more info you may have.

Thanks for helping.

Tom.

[thedom]

Now that I watched your project, I perfectly see what is your "problem".

Unfortunately, I do not have an immediate solution because it's quite complex.

If anybody else want to have a look, here is Tom's project : http://thefreedom.free.fr/heli.zip

Anyway, I like the idea. Don't know what it is for, but it's fun.

[JPD]

Look here, if you had see the end of my demo "Mise en boite" you would have understand how to do, the solution is also in the template of the cube which is on my page.

In the template I send you, you can change the angle between helicopter and rotor by changing the rotation of the first rectangle I add.

[Lin Evans]

Hi Tom,

As JPD has pointed out, you can use the rectangle within a rectangle as a parent/child/child relation to achieve this effect.

Just to make it possibly a little more clear. If you place a rectangle within a rectangle in a child relationship, then rotate the interior rectangle so that if falls on a 45 degree angle with relation to the outside rectangle, then set the horizontal and vertical zoom so they are independent (click the little box between them on the Animation screen) and change the horizontal zoom on the outside or "parent" rectangle, you can distort the interior rectangle into a trapezoidal or perhaps more accurately a parallelogram shape (trapezium I think you folks on the other side of the pond call it). It's a couple of these and of course lots more JPD uses to get his great Photo Album effect. Depending on the degree of rotation of the secondary rectangle and the amount of horizontal/vertical zoom differentiation there will be differential amounts of distortion.

If you look carefully at JPD's example by blowing up the view to 500% you can see the shape he achieves. This forces the rotors, as a child of the distorted rectangle into a similar shape. The upper rectangle's rotation determines the "pitch" of the rotor while the secondary rectangle's shape determines the rotor's angle in relation to the observer.

This achieves the effect of rotation of the object in a more or less horizontal direction to give you the desired effect.

Best regards,

Lin

Hi! Ken.

I have taken your advice and registered with Dropload, they don't provide for leaving a link to your file on forums,or do they?.

As far as I can see, every thing is done by e-mail and for that you need to know e-mail addies.

The only wnsoft forum members e-mail addie I have is the Doms as he sent it to me.

By using this method of contacting you,I believe you will be able to see my addie,please let me have any more info you may have.

Thanks for helping.

Tom.

[JPD]

Thanks Lin for your clear explanation in english, it's too much difficult for me to give a good explanation in this language.

[Tomuk]

Thank you to all of the above.

I shall have a try by following Lins instructions on JPd's method,

I will post my results for you to have a laugh at my uneducated attempts.

Tom.

[thedom]

JPD's method clearly shows how powerfull this parent/children feature is !

Congratulations guys.

Tom, I tried to make your sequence a little bit more "realistic", I hope you don't mind.

I added :

- "3D" helicopter,

- shadow of the helicopter on the lake,

- "3D" missile.

(I added "perspective correction" for both "3D" effect).

By the way, I don't know if you did it on purpose, but your A9 (background) image doesn't have to be a png.

For exactly the same result, a jpg is fine (285 kb instead of 1132 kb).

And I removed the soundtrack to make the project lighter to post it.

heli_revu_Feb3_2007_10_53_29.zip

[ronwil]

Congratulations to all. This mutual co-operation in developing the helicopter rotors has been fascinating and a credit to the forum members concerned. When I produced "HMS Gloucester" on 10 May 2006, shortly after the introduction of version 5.0, I received criticism from one UK member as regards the speed of the vessel and other matters. It was quite a broadside and rather deflated my experiments with version 5.0 so I took it off my website. I am pleased that this has been allowed to develop without such unwarranted criticism. Keep up the good work and boo to the purists.

Ron [uK]

[Ken Cox]

Ron

Keep up the good work and boo to the purists

hear hear

ken

[alrobin]

Dom,

That's very realistic! Nice work!

I can see a whole series of video games coming up next, once actions are added to objects again - Igor see what you've started!

[Tomuk]

Lin,

I told you I was dim.

For the life of me I can't get a rectangle set within a rectangle to rotate into the desired position, I have followed your instruction but without any joy.

I hope you can spot what I am doing wrong.

By the look of the amount of members who have been reading this thread, it looks to me that I am not the only one who wishes to extend their knowledge base.

Please keeep up your good work.

Tom.

[alrobin]

For the life of me I can't get a rectangle set within a rectangle to rotate into the desired position, I have followed your instruction but without any joy.

I hope you can spot what I am doing wrong.

Tom,

Have you examined Dom's demo (complete with project files)? The screenshots below show the effect of the two rectangles in twisting the rotor horizontally. You can look at their keypoints to see what values he used.

[Peter S]

Tom,

I have the same problems. As soon as I understand one thing I realise there is something else waiting to test me round the corner. I have just got the hang of PZR and using vertical and horizontal elements separately and am now strugling with all this parent child stuff. It is great to see how much can be done and it looks as if there is no end to either the possibilities or peoples inventiveness. Congratulations to them all.

I have just been trying some effects with lots of key points and found it difficult to keep track. I know from earlier reading that some of the most advanced users calculate positions with spread sheets but I would like to know what they do with the results. I cannot imagine that JPD puts all the points in by hand so what does he do with them?

I once read "The Lord put me on this earth to achieve a certain number of things. At the present rate I think I'll live forever." If understanding all the intricacies of PTE is one of my "things" I can agree with this sentiment.

Peter

[Tomuk]

Tom,

I have the same problems. As soon as I understand one thing I realise there is something else waiting to test me round the corner. I have just got the hang of PZR and using vertical and horizontal elements separately and am now strugling with all this parent child stuff. It is great to see how much can be done and it looks as if there is no end to either the possibilities or peoples inventiveness. Congratulations to them all.

I have just been trying some effects with lots of key points and found it difficult to keep track. I know from earlier reading that some of the most advanced users calculate positions with spread sheets but I would like to know what they do with the results. I cannot imagine that JPD puts all the points in by hand so what does he do with them?

I once read "The Lord put me on this earth to achieve a certain number of things. At the present rate I think I'll live forever." If understanding all the intricacies of PTE is one of my "things" I can agree with this sentiment.

Peter

Peter,

It's good to know I am not alone, I find it very flustrating not being able to insert things I know can be achieved into my shows, hopefully with the help of our friends on this forum P2e wont be the daunting place it seems to be at the moment.

I to would like to know how JPD and others use spreadsheets to heir advantage, maybe one day the will have time to explain.

Tom.

[Lin Evans]

Hi Tom,

LOL - You're not "dim" at all. In many years of teaching in the university, I've concluded that there are two primary types of learners. Some learn best by verbal instructions while others learn easier by visual instructions. Of course we all fall somewhere within these two extremes, but most of us have a decided tendency toward one or the other. This is why "audio/visual" is a very effective way of promoting understanding.

In this particular situation it's not often easy for a visual learner to translate words into an effective visual pattern. So I'm preparing a little Flash AV demo to show exactly how this works with your example. It will be ready as soon as the SWF file has completed which should be in about 20 minutes, so I'll modify this post with the link as soon as it's posted shortly. I think this will make it very easy to see for those who tend toward being visual learners.

Here's the link:

http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/rotorblade.zip

Best regards,

Lin

Lin,

I told you I was dim.

For the life of me I can't get a rectangle set within a rectangle to rotate into the desired position, I have followed your instruction but without any joy.

I hope you can spot what I am doing wrong.

By the look of the amount of members who have been reading this thread, it looks to me that I am not the only one who wishes to extend their knowledge base.

Please keeep up your good work.

Tom.

[Tomuk]

Lin,

You are a star,a bright shinning star, I will be sitting at my computer holding my breath awaiting your tutorial,

Could you also add it to the pinned tutorials incase my rapidly ageing memory should accelerate.

Tom.

[Lin Evans]

Lin,

You are a star,a bright shinning star, I will be sitting at my computer holding my breath awaiting your tutorial,

Could you also add it to the pinned tutorials incase my rapidly ageing memory should accelerate.

Tom.

LOL - I hope you didn't hold your breath for 30 minutes - that deprives the old "noggin" of much needed oxygen!

Here's the link to the little Flash 8 SWF file to see how this is accomplished. If you don't have a Flash viewer, the latest Irfanview with the latest plugins will play it for you. The SWF is zipped.....

http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/rotorblade.zip

Best regards,

Lin

p.s. I'll put it in the "pinned" tutorial section too.

[Peter S]

Lin,

I'm really looking forward to your demo. I have been experimenting to see how PTE can be used to produce a video to teach beginners to play croquet. This may be a dangerous admission! But did you know there are Test matches involving USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand?

Tom,

If you are still interested in surround sound I put another reply on your earlier question but I found it hard to find! So I will repeat here that Nero also has 5.1 capabilities shipped with recent versions under SoundTrax2. I can also confirm Audition version 1.0 has it.

Peter

[JPD]

Have you examined Dom's demo (complete with project files)? The screenshots below show the effect of the two rectangles in twisting the rotor horizontally. You can look at their keypoints to see what values he used.

Sorry Al, the Dom's demo is only a modification of the demo which is at the post that I did to answer at TomUK and was very well explain by Lin Evans.

Dom write :

I added :

- "3D" helicopter,

- shadow of the helicopter on the lake,

- "3D" missile.

He also add "perspective correction" for both "3D" effect.

I don't know what mean "3D" helicopter or missile, the pictures are exactly the same as those of TomUK.

The shadow isn't necessary because the sun is very low and in the back, it's impossible there is a shadow on the sea.

The use of the perpective correction for the helicopter is good, not this for the missile, when it start a missile is slow and goes quicker and quicker, so it's the standard zoom which is correct.

I have modify the modification of the answer I did and you can find the template here

I have change the size of the picture in order there are all at the same definition (to have the same quality, it need a better photo for the missile and the submarine).

I have reduce the size of the background (the part which is under the mask isn't necessary), cut the part of the submarine we never see and so on, the complete explanations are in the help of the file.

The new file is smaller of more than 200 Kb and need less memory and less power.

TomUK, you put a wav file on the slide, in Music option, it can't work if you use music in Project option, and I think this function isn't ready in V5 today.

[JPD]

Lin, I just see you tutorial : very nice, I hope that with it, every english spoken people will know how to use rectangles like that.

[Tomuk]

Jean-Pierre,

Thank you for your excellent comments,

I am sorry about the poor quality of some of my images, the submarine and helicopter I copied from a magazine using my flatbed scanner, the missile I drew in Photoshop (naughty but nice).

The project was not meant for public showing but as a vehicle for my learning curve.

The Dom asked me to send my project file so he could help, I sent it to him via an e-mail and he posted his version on the forum, I’m so glad he did because not only I but others have no dought benefited thanks to you and Lins video tutorial.

Tom.

P.S.

Jean-Pierre you forgot to rotate the rotors in your last post, or did you?.