I’ve created a simple shape and I want lot’s of them to fly at the camera in different ways. I’ve worked out a way to do it now but I was hoping if someone could shed light on something weird that was happening.
When I duplicated a shape with some animation all would be fine untill I tried to create/edit the keyframes of the duplicate. As soon as I did it would move the original as if it were sharing the keyframes.
I looked for a way to separate them but couldn’t find anything?
Thanks for any help. (I have my ‘Essential Blender’ book on pre-order )
You are exactly right, they are sharing keyframes (displayed as IPO curves). When you duplicate an object, you also copy its “links” to IPO curves, materials, etc. These attributes exist independently of the objects and affect them only through these so-called links. So you need to break or modify these links so your multiplied objects act independently.
For keyframes: Open an IPO editor window and select one of the duplicate objects. In the menu bar of this window you’ll see an entry like IP: ObIpo. This represents the single set of keyframes (IPO curves) that are linked to this object (and shared by all the other objects at the moment). You can now either
Click the big X to the right of this menu to delete the link between this object and this set of IPO curves. This is useful if you want to start animating the object afresh.
or
Click the number just to the left of the big X and confirm the Single User prompt. You have just made a new copy of these IPO curves and linked it to just the selected object. This is useful if you want to edit the existing animation, rather than starting from scratch.
Welcome to the world of blender object management! It’s very powerful once you get it.
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