Cineversity

I’m working on a project where a minigun is blasting away with rounds of ammo being fed into the chamber.

I’m using a cloner to align the bullets along the munitions feeder, however…
When using the offset feature inside of the cloner’s object tab, I have to start at 100% with a keyframe reducing the value to 0% over the course of the timeline. Which, isn’t bad as the intended effect results in the movement being what I wan—ammo container to the gun.

What is causing me a problem/headache, is that I would like bullets to be fed to the minigun at a faster rate. So, I’ve increased the rate percentage only to find that the bullets move in the opposite direction—from gun to ammo container, instead of ammo container to the gun.

I’ve hunted around online for a few hours but I haven’t been able to find a specific forum post where this particular issue has been addressed.

What am I missing exactly?

Hi helloimneil,

No idea without a scene file what happens, but be aware of the “Nyquist Theorem”, that we need at least twice the capture to represent a frequency, otherwise the results are wrong. Like the wheels of a car show up as if they would turn backwards.

This kind of animation was discussed, please have a look here:
https://www.cineversity.com/forums/viewthread/2464/

It was a longer thread about an automatic weapon. The key idea is here to repeat only one cycle, and have that cycle adjustable in speed. The Animation clip comes to mind! The feed of new bullets can be an extra animation, as it needs to get the length of the supply only shorter.

In other words, animation is not following always real world needs. I would say even, most of the time with repetition, we just cycle to the core and to make out magic believable we show somewhere a progressive change.

With a gun like that split it in three parts, fed, use, eject.

I hope that helps.

All the best

Thanks for the help, Dr. Sassi, that forum link held just the answers I was looking for!

Thanks for taking the time, helloimneil, very nice of you!

Have a great evening and my best wishes for your project.