I need to animate a curve. All the handles are set to Auto - the only things I need to vary are the locations of the control points and their ‘fatness’ (or whatever it is you change by pressing alt-S.)
Blender doesn’t seem to respond when I select a control point and I -> Loc. This is annoying. So instead I added a Hook to New Empty and that allows me to animate the position - but still no idea how to change ‘fatness’.
I have to animate about fifty of these control points. What do I do?
Does animating the empty/hook’s Scale property do the trick?
Nope. Scales the handles instead.
To move curve points you need to be in edit mode right???
I think u can only animate in object or posemode…
so ur best et might be to create hooks or armatures for each vertex u need…
But if ur motion is relatively simple or cyclic maybe there is some solution in the “modifiers” options…
like wave etc
nirmaldavid: You are correct, my initial attempt at animating in Edit mode didn’t work.
Hooks don’t provide me with access to fattening/shrinking, and nor, to the best of my knowledge, would Armatures. I have no idea how to get at this property.
I you want to stay with curves,
you could try to use the BevOb and TaperOb option from the EditPanels.
One CurveCircle for the BevOb and one extra curve for the TaperOb
This way you can animate the TaperObCurve (instead of the Fatness edit option) with Emptys as you did before.
But this sounds like no fun with 50 emptys per curve.
Bones can scale the CurveBevel too if you only scale them in x and z direction, but I think the curves transitions won’t look as smooth.
Patel
Patel: How do I go about doing that? If I understand you correctly, each control point would be hooked to an empty that then did something to the TaperOb?
to control the fatness of the curve, assign a bevel object to the curve. Then you can shape key or scale the curve with an ipo.
PapaSmurf: I don’t want to just resize the entire curve - I need individual control points to be getting fatter and thinner.
then that is a taper object. Taper controls the fatness along the curve. http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Modelling/Curves/Curve_Taper
Patel: How do I go about doing that? If I understand you correctly, each control point would be hooked to an empty that then did something to the TaperOb?
Maybe you found the solution in the meanwhile, but just to answer your question:
I did a quick setup in the attached file with, a BevelObject, a TaperObject, the base curve and the Empties.
Animating the empties gives you the control you want.
I am just curious, why do you want to use curves?
Patel
BevTaper.blend (169 KB)
PapaSmurf: Ah I see. And now I see what Patel meant, too. Cheers for the .blend, Patel.
I am just curious, why do you want to use curves?
I don’t, really. I was just playing with them in Edit mode and realised if I could just animate directly like this, it would make for a really nice workflow. Unfortunately blender opposed me at every turn, and while I’m grateful for all of your help I think this method is a bit too convoluted for the job. I will remember it for the future though.
So yeah, I’m going to have to go about this another way.