hello. I have a butterfly consisting of many different parts. i have already animated the wings and body movements using bones and keyframes. Now i want to animate the flightpath, but when i select all the objects and rotate it all my objects go all wrong. the butterfly gets messed up. what can i do? then there is the path. is it possible to group all the consisting parts of the butterfly and make the group follow the path?
help would be greatly appreciated. thanks…
i wanted to attach the blend file, but it was too big. but i hope you understand what i mean…
Did you try parenting all the butterfly parts to the “body” and having that “body” follow the path?
Why don’t you parent all the parts to an empty and let the empty follow the path. You can also post your blend to the many file host sites and just give a link.
An empty would give you more control over the butterflys’ center and movement.
hello. thank you for replies. i tried what you said and the butterfly still gets messed up. i uploaded the blend file here.
Thanks…
Howdy,
I have a feeling that’s not the link to use. There must be a copy link or something on mediafire like on youtube for vids etc… It will have a querystring tacked on the end, thats the bit after the ? on a link address.
Hope you get it sorted soon.
As for a butterfly flightpath it kinda makes me think of brownian motion…
are all the objects origins at the same point or are they at their own centers, that could be the problem.
sorry about that.
this should be correct:
http://www.mediafire.com/?m68ufr0zjqwwv2a
i have an anchor point for each object of the butterfly yes, but i need that in order to animate the wings i think.(?)
The empty-idea sounded great if only my butterfly would stop getting messed up.
thanks
That’s a cool looking butterfly.
You have multiple objects and multiple armatures for the different pieces. You could parent the whole lot to an empty.
However, I reckon you need to join all your meshes into one, and all your armatures into one also. Then edit the combined armature bones parenting them logically to make a heirarchy, leaving the thorax bone unparented as the root bone of the armature.
For instance to parent your legs to the thorax bone, in edit mode select all the legs upper leg bones in the combined armature and lastly the thorax bone and ctr-p (or object > parent > set ) choose “keep offset” this will make the base of the bones always protrude form the same spot on thorax … hmm it occurs you to me now you obviously know how to do this based on your armature… You’ll have that thing flapping a few mins.
With thorax as the root bone wherever the thorax bone goes the butterfly will follow.
You could also keep all the armatures as seperate objects parent them to bones of the appropriate object. this’d make it easier to pull the wings/legs off…
Great model man. Well set up, a couple of select alls and control J’s and it was looking ready to roll.
last time I made a butterly, I parented it to an empty which tracked a path. Then I added an f-curve noise modifier to the empties height value. This randomised the tragectory of flight, simulating wing beat lift. But if you watch to long it fails.
thank you for good help. i figured out how to solve my problem as well without parenting i think. i realized that my bones and objects has to be marked(not only the objects/mesh) and parented to the empty. that way the objects wont get messed up. stupid thing really, that i didnt see that… now i think that it should be ok thought. will try to make the path now.
thanks…