Smooth rotation?

I was playing around with rotation yesterday, trying to make a helicoptor rotor. I tried setting a timer for .25 seconds to rotate it 45 degrees. It seems that timers will only go down to .5 seconds, unless I was doing something wrong. Anyway, I wound up with a very choppy 'rotor' which acted more like the second hand on a clock, jumping from one position to the next. It did however make a funny bench, as several people in the sandbox with me discovered. How can I make something rotate smoothly, like a propellor or rotor? I dont want to use a moving texture if possible, I'd like to use prims.

llTargetOmega is the only way to smoothly rotate prims. Everything else is subject to lag. The most convincing rotors and propellers that I've seen have been textures-- good luck doing it with prims.

Try llTargetOmega, which rotates on the client side. Test the limits of how fast you can spin something with that. It still won't be fast enough to spin how you need it to, but it'll be faster.

I would try this: use llTargetOmega to spin it on the client side. As the rotor spins up, increase the spin rate a few times say every 2 seconds. When it gets to a certain point, change the rotor to a semi-transparent circle (say a very squat cylinder). When the motor slows back down, transition from the circle to the spinning rotors using llTargetOmega.

So you'll actually have 2 sets of rotors, and you'll always have one set of them turned off by setting them to 100% transparent.

Think that'll work?

Actually, having both the TargetOmega rotors and the texture visible for a short time might be a good effect. Like having the physical rotors fade from 0% transparent to 100% transparent over time, while the texture rotor is fading in.

For motion picture and game work, propellers and rotors are usually prerendered with motion blur "baked in". They look much more convincing that way, and even if your propeller rotates erratically, they still look good even at low frame rates.

Yeah, I have noticed that on most of the props I have seen. Cubey Terra has a couple of nicely done props which are prims when at rest, but when the engine is running, they change to the 'blurred' textures you mentioned.