Make things move

A spinning pickup, a bobbing gem, a door that swings, dust drifting. None of this needs keyframes. There is a clock, and you do arithmetic on it.

When you need this something has to move on its own, forever, without anyone animating it.

Everything starts at the clock

The Time node hands you a number that grows as time passes. That is the only source of motion you need. Multiply it and you have a rate; feed it through a wave and you have something that goes back and forth.

Its Speed is per second by default, which means a rate you can reason about without knowing the frame rate. A spin of ninety degrees per second is ninety degrees per second on any machine.

Turning it into a spin

Multiply the clock by how many degrees per second you want, and feed that into a rotation. That is the whole recipe.

Worth knowing: a shape built from a primitive stands up along its own axis, and the three rotation angles are one set applied in a fixed order, so asking for "stand it up and then turn it" in a single node does not do what it sounds like. The reliable way to get an upright thing spinning is to start with something already upright. An outline extruded into a plate is drawn standing up, which is why it is the easy shape to spin.

Turning it into a bob

A wave gives you a number that runs smoothly from minus one to one and back. Multiply it by how far you want the thing to rise, add where you want it to float, and feed that into a position.

Here is the number everybody gets wrong. One full wave is not one, it is about 6.28. So a bob that should take three seconds needs the clock multiplied by 6.28 divided by 3, not by 3, and not by 1. Feed a plain clock into a wave and you get one slow cycle every six and a bit seconds, which reads as broken rather than as slow.

Seat before you move, not after

Anything that sets a position replaces what was there. Seating a shape on the ground and then moving it throws the seating away.

Put the movement first and the seating last, unless the movement is the thing lifting it off the ground, in which case do not seat it at all.

One transform at a time

Two of them in a row do not add up. The second replaces the first, so a static tilt followed by a moving spin loses the tilt.

Put both angles on one node where you can. Where you cannot, a Join between them keeps the first from being overwritten.