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Animating arrows along a spline
I’m trying to show the path of gasoline through the valve of a pump and into a gas can, illustrating the flow by a series of 3d arrows along a spline. The path itself is quite long and I’d rather not have to animate each individual arrow, offset by a few keyframes, traveling single file on the path. Is there a way to configure the Emitter Object to fire off one at a time or possibly to duplicate the animation of my initial arrow to form the moving line of arrows? It sounds to me like this is a job for Thinking Particles but I’m just getting started and am not familiar with its workflow as yet.
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7 Replies
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I like mograph for this sort of thing.
You set the cloner to object, place the spline as the object, then animate the offset. C4dcafe has a tank track tutorial that might be of some assistance.TP can also do this nicely too, with a better “flow” feeling. There are also some good tutorials on c4dcafe that explain this very well.
/Randy
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How I wish I had MoGraph! I guess I’ll jump into Thinking Particles and see if C4dCafe can give me a jump-start. Thanks for the tip.
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You can use the “Move on Spline” Preset from the content browser.
Then all you need to do is add an emitter (Pstorm) and a Pshape in xpresso.
THen you need Particle geometry, null object (emitter) and the shape (your arrow).
Here is a really quick set up. Click the Pstorm node to get the settings… there are a few attributes to adjust in the “move on spline) null too.
https://www.randyarchy.com/TPspline.c4d.zip
Good luck./Randy
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Thanks! I appreciate the help. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
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This is terrific! Now I see that wrapping my mind around Thinking Particles is going to take some concentration. It’s a powerful tool indeed. I was able to get my arrows propelling nicely along the spline but haven’t been able to align the main axis of the arrow to be coincident with the spline itself so it can follow the path without pointing off at an angle. Maybe there’s another setting I’m missing.
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I needed to do the same thing for airflow in a mower deck, and I found this plugin at the CGSociety.
https://www.tarabella.it/c4dbeta/plugin_detail.php?Id_plugin=18
The free version is fantastic, but the paid version is only 44 euros and adds a bucnh of cool stuff to it.
The only thing is that the arrow spline that you want to animate on the path needs to be at 0 for XYZ coordinates, as you can control where on the path the arrow is by moving the original arrow spline along XY or Z. I had a hard time figuring out why mine wsn’t working, then I zeroed out the coord for the arrow and bam, it worked.
Let me know if you need an example scene, I can upload one. Definitely worth a look, though.
Its more fun to ride a slow motorcycle fast than a fast motorcycle slow…
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Thanks, Matt. I’ll check this one out as soon as I get home from work. You know, one problem I’m having with Thinking Particles is if I have two systems in close proximity in the same scene.they interact with each other and the particles stop aligning to their respective paths. Since I couldn’t solve that interaction I was forced to manually animate single shapes along a second spline.
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