In keeping with my personal investigation into using a curve to create a complex procedural extrusion, I am finding Blender’s handling of curves and dupliframes to be quite odd.
With a single curve I wanted to guide a number of animated objects, but also dupliframe a bunch of different objects. Since the the “No Speed” button, which I thought made animations along a curve ignore the Speed IPO, seems to be non functioning in the latest version of Blender I figured I’d use Empties as the basis of all my duplis and animation. Particularly, I wanted one empty for each different kind of movement along that curve. That way, I can have a common denominator for all the different objects intended to follow the curve. The idea was to have one empty that moved along the curve at a constant speed, and another that would change speed along the curve to create the animation. Instead of using a Speed IPO, I could use a Time IPO on the empty intended to change speed.
I then planned to use Copy Location constraints to make the objects following the curve constrain to the empty pertaining to their intended behaviour. If I run the animation, the object in question moves along the curve exactly as I intended, but when it came time to dupli the object that was copying the location of an empty, nothing happens.
Aside from appealing for a possible solution to my problem, I’d like to ask if there is any proper channel through which I may make suggestions to the developers of Blender. I have been doing a lot of work and experimentation with curves and duplis recently, and I have a sizeable list of suggested improvements.
Is a path not simply a synonym for a 3D Bezier curve? I’m starting with a bezier that I make 3D because I’ve received some very odd results from paths if I remove vertices from them.
I just did some experiments with paths instead of Beziers and am having the same problem. It appears I might’ve been wrong about the No Speed option, which only affects duplis, and not animations. It also does not affect Follow Path constraints, just children of the curve.
But anyway, the scenario I just set is as follows:
I added a path.
I added an empty
I added a cube.
I made the empty a child of the path and cleared its origin.
Added a Copy Location constraint to the cube, making it copy the location of the empty.
At this point, when the animation is run, the empty follows the curve, as does the cube.
Now what I would like to do is dupliframe the cube. I woulda thought since it moves as the frames progress, it should dupliframe like any other object in motion. But hitting the dupliframe button does nothing.
I see, it’s understandable. Dupliframe works only for curves. The parent of the box is an empty, so dupliframe does nothing.
However you should rather look into why isn’t the No speed option working for you. It works for me just fine.
I actually don’t know what’s the difference between path and curve, but I use paths :-).
Now I tried it and No speed works only for paths. So that’s the difference.
If you still want, you can reach developers on http://projects.blender.org/ . There is a bug tracker, you can submit your suggestions with example blend files and someone will hopefully look into it
Not so. Dupliframes works with straight forward keyframe animation and follow path constraints, so it stands to reason that Copy Location constraints should work too.
The problem with the No Speed was that I was using Follow Path constraints. Apparently they don’t count.
The problem I am facing is that some objects that are supposed to be dupliframed need to not rotate on the X Axis, since they’re should always point away from gravity (support beams and hanging lamps)
You know I’m having the same problem with hooks/empties in my set up . I set up a NURBS surface (circle) with hooks at each control point . I wanted to change the shape of the circle in animation and I tried the path/curve route and the hooks/empties deformed the shape well in animation but when I tried to dupliframe them there was no change in the original shape … I also tried just keyframing them without a curve but with the same results … It’s really odd, when I dupliframe the empties as well they go to the spot they were keyed to … I mean the animation acts like I intended it to … maybe the problem isn’t the contraints but the empties/hooks with regard to dupliframes (somehow the transformations are not “sent through” to the dupliframe calculations )?