Hello World

In this initial tutorial, you will learn how to make a simple rotating earth animation. You therefore will see how to create objects, materials and finally how to animate them. I hope you will enjoy it.

1. Add the earth ball to the scene
Create a ball object from the menu "ObjectsPolygonobjectBall", or with help of the tool bar.

A ball should appear in the 3D view and in the objects browser. The newly created ball is already selected. The properties of the ball are displayed within the properties editor.

2. Create the material
Now we have to create a material for our ball. To do that select "Material" from the "Add material" pull down button of the material browser. Now you have a new material and the properties of the material are already displayed in the properties editor.

3. Set up the material
To add the world map texture to our newly created material click onto the word "texture" at the right side of the diffuse channel.

A menu will now pop up. Please select "Textures -> image". This will connect a image texture node to the diffuse color channel.

The texture properties will now be visible.To load the texture click on the "Load" button. Use the image file that contains the texture you want to map onto your world.

Notice that we already get a preview of our material in the material browser.


4. Assign the material to the earth
To add the new material to our ball object you just have to drag and drop the material from the material browser onto the ball in the object browser. Now the world map finally appears on the ball in the 3D view.

It's also possible to drag and drop the material directly onto the ball in the 3D view.


5. Record initial position
In the next steps we have to define our animation. First select the ball object in the object browser. Now we can animate the earth object.
We want to keep the current position of the earth as our starting point. So we just click on the "Record" icon in the timeline control panel. Now a first key appears in the time line at time 0.0 .

6. Set up the ending time
Now we have to record the endpoint of our animation. We therefore have to change the time first. To do that move the "Time marker" to 4.0 by dragging and dropping it.

7. Define the end position of the animation
Next we change the rotation property of the earth ball by setting it to (360 ,0 , 0). That will cause a full 360° rotation around the Y axis 4 second.

8. Finally record the endpoint of the animation
To record the new rotation property click again on the "Record" icon of the timeline. You can now already preview the animation by clicking onto the "Play" icon .

9. Render the animation
Now you just have to position the camera and you are done. To see how to position the camera please check out the 3D View chapter of the Cheetah3D documentation.

Finally it's time to render the animation. But that is the easiest part. Just click onto the "Render Animation" icon in the toolbar and you are done. Rendering the animation shouldn't take much longer than a few seconds for a 320x240 resolution.

Congratulations! You've just created your first 3D animation with Cheetah3D. Feel free to play around with all the other properties of the objects, tags and materials, and learn how they work. You can find the whole project in the examples folder which comes with Cheetah3D.