I was afraid of that. Animation nodes might be a good solution since that’s basically just visual programming with some built in functions.
To get by for now, I created a single hair particle and used particle instancer on another object to put it at the end of the hair. I just have to animate my object in a little circle first if I want that object to actually start at zero so that the hair’s end point is the same as it’s base point to start.
The thing I don’t like about doing that, is since it’s a particle system, I have to be sure to cache all the animation before rendering. I’m not so sure animation nodes would be much different though.
I just aske because I noticed Maya works different. I was watching a video and the guy constrained a dummy to a circle path with an object constraint. And every time he moved the circle, the dummy moved along the path based on maybe the motion vector of the circle. But in blender, it sticks to the circle, but always tries put itself back to the position recorded in the transform.
It seems like this post might be the right direction as well, but it is Old, and the very last post said that it’s depricated and to use something else: Execute custom script when object is moved - #9 by batFINGER
Because, yes, doing it on frame change would work for an animation, but it’s nice to also just grab something and see what’s going to happen, so I’d want to evaluate on an object being moved as well.
With animation nodes at least you can set it to always run, or run on frame change. So just have it set to always when you’re messing with that animation. Then turn it back to on frame change.
So I guess I could just use animation nodes to evaluate an object’s current world position, then make it’s current transform match that position. The limit controller should still work, I think.
In the end I just want one object to drag behind another. But if the other object moves over top of that object, to not move the dragged object. And I’m trying to learn the most effective way of doing that.