I’m making an animation of a conveyer belt which will have hundreds or possibly thousands of sausages going along it. I’ve animated the sausage to go along the belt. Is there a way to duplicate the sausages with a time offset so they come after each other but have them linked to the original sausage so if I make any adjustments it will affect all of the sausages?
Check out this guy’s tutorial:
Instead of tank track elements it would be sausages…
basically you want to place an Array modifier followed by a curve modifier on your sausage object…
but if you do it that way you will get distortion in your original object…
Thus you have to build an in between object (a belt) that gets the curve modifier applied to it…
this belt needs to be a flat plane with no 3rd dimension in order to avoid distortion…
then you parent the sausage to the belt…
Then goto the Properties Panel > Obejct (box icon) > Duplicate > use ‘faces’
every where you have a ‘face’ on the belt you will have a sausage
animate the belt moving along the curve…
This is not the only way to do it…
there also are Path constraints…
Thanks guys!