Hello,
I am working on an animation of an airplane taking off, to do this I have animated it for the first few seconds then used a follow curve. However I cannot work out how to get it to move at a constant speed whilst following the curve, see the video below for what I mean by this.
Hi,
set keyframes to linear
cf manual page relating to graph editor https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/graph_editor/index.html
Look up any combination of these words on youtube : blender graph editor interpolation bézier
I forgot to mention that in my post, I had already tried that but it does not seem to work:
Ah yes, forget about this evaluation time thing, that’s legacy. It confuses everybody, it really ought to be removed. Also unparent the plane from the curve. Instead use a follow path constraint. Tick “fixed position” and animate the “offset factor” property.
I have removed the parent, what do I need to do next, from frame 55 I want the airplane to start following the curve at a constant speed.
What is the blocker ?
Blockquote
What is the blocker ?
Sorry what do you mean by that
I suggested a few instructions above, did you try ?
I wasn’t really sure what I needed to do.
There’s two approaches for animating objects along a curve. The one you have been using is legacy, is not very controllable, relies on object hierarchy to work at all… I advise against using it. Instead, constrain your plane to the curve with a follow path constraint, tick the “fixed offset”, and keyframe the “offset factor” property.
It is clamped in the range 0…1, 0 being the curve start and 1 the curve end. Make sure you pick different axes for forward and up
Ah, you’ve got transforms on your objects. That wouldn’t be a problem if you were using an armature or an empty to animate the plane, but now these transforms are interfering with the animation.
Disable the constraint for now, create an empty on the plane and parent the plane to it. This will be your new controller. Now you can animate/constrain the empty instead of the plane directly.
The way constraints usually work (there are a couple exceptions) is they add to the object transforms. Right now the empty sits at -23m on Y. So you should clear the empty location (alt+G) and it will return to the curve start.
That now seems to be working, however it is still slowing down near the end.
Double check that it is indeed linearly interpolated
Not sure why but even when I have done that it still seems to get slower.
Just to let you know I have found a different way of doing this and it seems to be working fine now, thank you so much for your help.