Animating a spinning arrow?

[shinobitechno]

I need some help, and cant seem to really "grasp" the proccess of animating a spinning arrow (from a side angle). Could anyone advise me on what to do? or maybe point me in the direction of a tutorial? I tried searching for one on animating spinning arrows (or any objects for that matter) but nothing came up that matched my needs.

[ColdLogic]

take a peice of cardboard, cut it into the shape of an arrow, and spin it like that.

basically just gets shorter from that view, until it flips then it gets longer, and by longer i mean up and down length.

[dELtaluca]

it will do so (assuming orthographic projection, although under perspective projection for such a small shape it will very accurately model it) as a function of the cosine of the angle too assuming constant angular velocity

Ofcourse if you don't want it to look like a flat shape rotating it's not such a simple trick

[Snipper64]

Ok, make the arrow. Make it a symble. In that symble, make the arrow another symble.

So far you have a symble within a symble.

Go inside of FIRST symble, and make a key frame in side of it, lets say at the 10 mark. At the ten mark, use the box tool (The one that selects an object and allows you to stretch if) and make it "almost" flat, but still faceing that side it was on, so just reduce the height. Then on frame 11, make another flat one, but have it FLIP! Very important!. It should still look like fram 10, but flipped verticaly, then go to fram 20. and make the final frame look like the first just flipped. Add a motion tween, and you are good!

Summery
Sceane 1, symble 1, Frames....

1----------10,11--------20

1=Oringinal arrow
10= Oringinal arrow, but reduce hieght, should look flat.
11= Same as 10, but go to "modify--->Transform---->flip verticaly)
20= Same as frame 1, but flipped the same way.

Remember the motion tween!