Overhead Road animation help required...

Raistlin182 · Post by **Raistlin182** » Fri Jul 31, 2009 2:35 pm

Hi there,

The basic thing I am trying to achieve is an overhead view of vehicles travelling along a road.

Problem 01
I have my images of a road and vehicles, and have been using the 'Rotate to Follow Path' option for tracking the cars to point in the right direction when they are moving. The problem is that when they reach the end of the animation path they automatically point upwards again, even though I want them to stop facing a different direction. Is there a way (handles) to adjust the tangent of the final point to face a certain direction?

Problem 02
I want a flashing light on one of the trucks to 'stick' to the cab of the truck throughout the animation, but can't parent a vector circle (with visibility cycling and a halo etc to simulate a flashing light) to a point on my imported image. Is this possible or does the tracking have to be done entirely by hand?

Hope these make sense...

Thanks all,

Raistlin182

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Fri Jul 31, 2009 3:45 pm

2: Put the car and the flashlight into a group layer. Now you have to move the group layer to follow your road, but everything inside will neatly stick together.

Raistlin182 · Post by **Raistlin182** » Fri Jul 31, 2009 4:11 pm

Many thanks Slowtiger. I guessed it would be in a group, and the Help file talks about 'Group Layers', yet as simple as it seems there is no option for a newbie to see called 'Group Layer'. I've simply used a bone layer and stuck my images in that.

Now to hope the 'Rotate to Follow Path' problem can be solved....

Regards,

Raistlin182

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Fri Jul 31, 2009 9:10 pm

If the object on the layer that is following the path needs some additional rotation use a bone layer and add a bone. Bind the points or sublayers of your moving trucks and cars. When you get to a spot in the animation where you need to turn you can use bone keys to do this.

-vern

tonym · Post by **tonym** » Sat Aug 01, 2009 7:57 pm

Raistlin182 wrote: Now to hope the 'Rotate to Follow Path' problem can be solved....

Drag your final Translate Layer keyframe so that it is one additional keyframe beyond your animation.

For example, if your cartoon ends on frame 500, drag that keyframe to frame 501. Your car will then not revert back to the orginal vertical position.