-
Attaching a face to a swinging worm animated with Path.
Hi, I am making an animation of a worm moving its neck around. The worm body is made with a vector line(shape) and it’s animated in the path layer. I want to attach a face to the end of the moving/swinging neck but I don’t know how to do that except placing it manually frame by frame. I know if the shape of the neck doesn’t change I can simply use “parent/child” to link but it doesn’t work in this case because the shape changes as well as its length.
Is there any easy way to achieve this? Pleas advise. Thanks a million in advance!
-
5 Replies
-
if it is made with a shape layer ‘line’, you can use the points to nulls command to have nulls follow the vertex’s’s of your line, then parent the face to the relevant null.
-
Really?? Can you please explain a bit more? (Sorry, I am still a newbie…). Maybe some reference or tutorial? Thanks a bunch in advance!
-
If you have an animated path, selected the path and run the ‘Nulls follow points’ command. If you want to use the nulls to animate the path, select un-animated path and run the ‘Points follows null’ command. Either way, you get a null per point, that you can parent stuff to.
(command is found in the windows drop down on the top bar)
-
It works! The only thing is that when the face doesn’t rotate when it follows the Null. I normally use “Auto-Orient” to paths but it doesn’t seem to work with this. Is there a way to rotate the attached comp as the direction of the point changes?
-
you’ll need someone better with expressions than me, but I would imagine yes, there will be a way to ‘link’ the angle of the path to the patented item. You might be better creating a ‘Look at’ null and linking the nulls pos to the item’s rotation, again, you’ll need someone smarter than me! That option gives you more flexibility I think.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up