How To Create A Carousel Effect Easy Method?

Sometimes when you create a really excellent model in Blender, you want to show it off to the world, and you can do this either by rendering a still image, or you can create a special kind of animation. To display all of our model’s angles, we will use the carousel effect.

To apply the carousel effect to your model, create a stand for the model to sit on and then parent the model to that stand. Create an animation for the Z rotation of the stand. This way, your model will rotate 360 degrees or beyond for your animation.

There are different ways to create a carousel effect in Blender. We could rotate our camera around our objects, for example, or use a special carousel add-on. But this is what we find to be the easiest method for beginners.

Creating The Main Model

Your first step is to either create or import the primary model that you wish to focus on with the carousel effect.

The steps you take to create your primary model will depend on the design you are focusing on. So complete your model and then hide it from view using the H key on your keyboard. This is so we can more easily set up the stand in the next step.

Setting Up The Stand

Now we’re going to create a stand on that we are going to position our primary model. The stand, therefore, needs to be wider than the model itself.

The easy shape to use here will be a cylinder, so adding a primitive cylinder shape and then adjusting the depth value, which is the sizing of the Z axis.

Add And Position The Cylinder

Position your cylinder just on top of the blender grid. Then add a third object to your scene. This bird object can be a simple plain that will act as the ground underneath the stand. Scaled a plane on the X&Y axes to make it large enough to cover the camera’s view.

Once you have both the stand and the plane in place, bring back your primary model by using the hotkey Alt + H. Then position the primary model to sit on top of the stand.

Position Object On Stand

The stand is likely to use flat shading, so use the right mouse button to bring up the object context menu and select shade auto smooth. This will give it smooth shading but avoids any of these shading artifacts we see when we just shade smooth.

Parenting The Object To The Stand

There are different ways to create our carousel effect, but our chosen method is to have our main objects rotate with the standard it sits on.

To achieve this, we need to parent the main object to the stand. Select the main model first and then hold down the shift key and select the stand second.

Set Parent

Use the hotkey Control + P to open up the parent menu. Select the object option from this list, and you will parent your main model to the stand. Now, if you change the location, rotation, or scale of the stand, you will also change the transforms of the main model.

Positioning The Camera

With the objects within your scene set up and ready to go, you must position your camera in the correct location. The easiest way to do this is to press the end key to open up the side panel.

Then go to the View tab in the side panel and tick the box that says Lock view to camera. Now, you can also move the camera when you orbit, pan, and zoom in on the 3D viewport.

Lock Camera To View For Easy Positioning

Use this feature to adjust the positioning of your camera so that it ends up exactly where you want it for your animation.

In addition to camera positioning, you will also want to ensure that you have good lighting for your model. Since we’re working with a single main object, we can focus our lighting on that object.

Open up the preferences panel by going to edit, then preferences. Select the add-ons tab and look for a tri-lighting add-on. Enable this add-on and then close the preferences panel.

Three Point Lighting

Select your main object and then open up the add menu. Go to the lights section, and from the second menu that appears, choose the three-point lighting setup. You will now have three lines all pointed towards your model. You can adjust their settings in the operating panel to get the look you want.

If you have not done so, now is the time to add materials to your scene. You probably will already have materials applied to your primary model, but you can also apply materials to the stand and ground plane.

Rendering The Rotation

The last step will be to rotate the carousel and animates that rotation. Start by selecting the stand and then press the I key to open up the insert keyframe menu.

It’s a large menu, but the one we want to select will be the rotation option. So select rotation to insert a keyframe for your carousel.

Set Rotation Keyframe

Next, go to the end frame of your animation, whatever that may be. Our animation will be a 10-second clip running at 24 frames per second. So we are going to go to frame 240.

Open up the side panel in the 3D viewport, and you will notice that the rotation values all have a green color to indicate that a keyframe has been assigned to them elsewhere. Change the value of the rotation. Note that the higher the value, the slower the animation will appear.

Adjust Rotation For Second Keyframe

Set this to 360 degrees as a baseline, and press the I key on top of the rotation to insert the new keyframe.

Now go back to frame one in your timeline and play the animation. If the rotation is too slow, you can increase the Z value rotation of the second keyframe. If the animation is too fast, then you can decrease that value.

Thanks For Reading

We appreciate you taking the time to read through the article, and we hope you found the information you were looking for. If you are interested in learning more about how you can render images and animations in Blender, then look at some of the articles we have listed below.

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