How to Animate a Propeller in Blender (Tutorial)

Here is a simple way to animate your propeller (or any other spinning object such as a wind turbine or a submarine screw etc.) in Blender without the use of keyframes. Enjoy!

[jbblenderbreakdown]

Important note: When you add the driver, MAKE SURE THE PROPELLER IS SELECTED.

[cargobroom]

I just want to say that this video and the tracer bullet videos have been invaluable - excellent tutorials and I wouldn't have been able to create my first animation without them! Thank you so much!

[allenm]

Awesome tutorial!! I had problems getting mine to work, solved by using Ctrl+A to apply rotation to my propeller at frame 0 (in case anyone else had the same issue). Then it worked like a charm.

[haraldschjlbergevensen]

Awesome video! :D But:
KEEP IN MIND THIS METHOD IS ONLY ACCURATE FOR CONSTANT SPEED PROPELLERS!

If you for example have the throttle to 0 (y-axis position 0), and immediately set it to 1 in frame 2, then in frame three the propeller will have rotation 2 (throttle 1 * frame 2 = 2). So a rotating speed of "2 rotation per frame" for that frame.
However if you have throttle at 0 until frame 100 and set it to 1, you will get it to have rotation 100 in frame 100. "100 rotation per frame" in that exact frame, as it speeds to "catch up".

So you cannot control the speed of the propeller using this method, unless you have a constant speed.

Earlier this year I had a commercial project where I needed to animate the speed of the propellers on a drone. That is, not just making it spin, but making the speed at which it spins change over time, like throttling up and down. I initially tried your method (didn't find your video before now so giving my advice here now), but I ran into the challenge I mentioned above. The answer was a simple python script for solving the propeller position for each consecutive frame.

So essentially, using the Blender python api (bpy), grabbing the local space position of the throttle (which was parented to the drone), and multiplying it with an arbitrary scaling constant, and adding this value to the rotation of the previous frame to get the rotation of the new frame. I ran this script every time I made a change to the animation in order to get the throttling up and down just right.

The pseudocode looks like this:

frame_0_rotation = 0
for frame in scene:
next_frame_rotation = current_frame_rotation + * scaling_constant

using the Blender python api to access and edit any involved variables.

Also, in addition to enabling motion blur like in the end of the video, if you want that "bendy" propeller look like there is in one of the examples in the video, you need to enable rolling shutter.

I hope someone somewhere will be able to get past a problem thanks to this comment :)

[bigshot]

Thanks for this. It seemed complicated at first but everything worked out well. I'm a happy camper.

[indieartsmidwest]

Great method and easy to understand. Thank you this was super helpful.

[Mortom]

Thank you very much man! So simple, so effective!

[shivammittal]

Hey can u pls tell how to this fan to move fast ?
Like I want to make a car wheel to rotate faster?
Cause it's slow

[tarus]

Would be nice if you told us how to set the point of origin if we had to separate the propeller from the object.

[marufkilichev]

Hi thank u for your help !!!I saw your lessons and i decide that your video tutorials way easier to get than others, i have a request for u, could you make a video about modeling Helicopter Mi-8 or fither f22 in higth poly mode, with detallization, thank u in advance !

[GoofyGoober]

How do i also stop the propeller for landing animations?

[layrik-]

when i press n 2:33 a different menu pops up says show cursor and the left menu there is nothing to select

[Iskefisk]

when i make a driver keyframe on the plane, and go to the driver window and select my proppelar my driver menu dont show up. and i also dont know how to parrent my plane parts together (cant find any tutorials) my plane has difrent folders for the difrent parts of the plane.

[mavikaktus]

I want to turn my propeller on the Z-axis but I couldn't manage it. It turns on the Y-axis for all the selections of X-Y-Z Locations of throttle. Could you please help me about that?

[wesjones]

What if you select the propeller and then go to drivers and nothing shows up?

[ArandomHitman]

Hey, how do you speed this up? I also have two propellers on my plane so I want to reverse the direction of one of the propellers.

[kampferadib]

The propeller is not moving along with the plane when rotated or moved. Need help

[eternalself]

Great tutorial. When I export as an mp4 I still don’t see much blur on my propeller. It looks good when it’s rendering image by image with eevee, however. Is there a way to make it look better? Thanks

[abrahamjunarno]

do you have also a tutorial how to do that flying bullet? in the air? like firing in the warplane.

[lucaszhou]

Hi, a question, how did you parent the propeller so that it rotates around the point of origin?