I have been using paths to animate objects for years. I simply assumed that it would be a trivial matter to simply layout objects along a path and have them stand still, but it seems not.
I added a speed curve to the path and set it flat so there is no movement along the path. I then wanted to use the offset to deploy a series of dupligrouped empties along the path. But that does not work. It seems path constraint offset only works if the speed curve has a slope.
I have ten or more of these things. It looks like now, I am going to have to make 10 copies of the path and make 10 different speed curves to control the placement. This seems like a cumbersome approach just to do layout along a curve.
As i pointed out before, why not just use a 10 vertex circle (or whatever shape) and have your dupliverts from the vertices. It only requires you parent one set of whatever you’re duping to the mesh. For alternating characters have two circles.
Yeah, duplivert would work, but then I would be locked into not being able to set them back into motion along the path. It would be nice if you could stop something mid-path, hold, then start motion down the path again without using a different speed curve for every object. Maybe Evaluation time in 2.5 actually works better?
Gosh I miss C4D, I kind of feel like I am slumming today, using Blender.
You could position them with a curve modifier instead. Make a single vertex mesh. Apply the curve modifier to make it ‘follow path’. Make it a dup parent.
@liero: Interesting, I was just wondering what that new check box was for. But it seems to be an either/or kind of thing. If I enable the Fixed Position checkbox, I am basically saying I want to override Evaluation time on this object only.
@batFinger: I did give the curve modifer a try. I took a cube and removed all but one vertex. I re-centered the mesh origin on that vertex effectively making a mesh based empty. I enabled dupligroup and typed in the group name. This gave me my object. Because this is a mesh and not an Empty I now have the ability to add a modifier to it. I tried the curve and discovered that in both 2.49 and 2.5 the object dupligrouped does not jump to the same position as the mesh on the curve. Quite disappointing. A nice feature would be a check box that causes the final transformational world position from the enitre modifer stack applied to be used instead of the objects origin.
If memory serves, isn’t it the Time IPO that determines exactly where along the path the object is? I seem to recall that, by varying this curve up-and-down, you can cause an object to move back and forth along the curve, reminiscent of an old cat-food commercial. (And if you never saw one of those commercials, don’t bother looking it up … you really don’t want to know.)
If you use liero’s example you could try animating the offset instead of evaluation time. It works with multiple objects on the same curve, but I have not tried with dupligrouped empties.
