The types of animation we have been doing right now are simple key frame animations. There is also the ability to cause translation along a path as supposed to from point to point. I am going to create a new timeline and I am going to call this one “motion path.”
The motion path says “I am going to create or have some geometry that I want my sphere to follow over the course of this animation. I am going to create that path by creating a large rectangle in the center of my art board.”
The color is really unimportant because all I want is the geometry of the rectangle. With the rectangle selected I go up to the object menu in other path, choose convert to motion path. A dialog comes up asking me, which element should be following the motion path. I wish to use the sphere. I can select it and press OK.
Now, the rectangle has served this purpose. So, I really do not need it. So, I am going to select it and delete it. When I press play now on this timeline, the sphere follows where the rectangle was. If I move in the timeline to my sphere again, I can expand the render transform and under translation there is a motion path. The blue bars indicate at what time the motion path should start and then what time it should end so I can drag these bars around to cause the animation to be faster or slower.
Now, that the entire motion path will take five seconds. The sphere will move more slowly. In the same way that I can set the repeat count on animations to look forever, I can also right click the timing bar on the motion path and edit its repeat count until it repeats forever.
You will notice that when I added the timeline by default the window loaded received the motion path begin of it. Now, when I press F5 my sphere is going to start moving around in its rectangle and then soon as I touch one of the controls it will interrupt that animation and start a new one.
The motion path geometry is like many other geometries in blend. So with that element selected. You can actually see the path that is going to follow. If I use a direct selection tool, I can edit that geometry the same way I edit other elements geometry and I can drag the points around. Now, when I press play it will follow the new path instead of the original one.
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