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Animating a chain of segments
Hi,
I have to animate a pipeline layed by a ship. The ship moves left to right and segment pipes should appear at the end of the ship forming the pipeline and slowly lowering to the seabed. So the pipeline kind of bends in a natural way between the ship and the ground. I guess I have to parent the segments to each other but it doesnt’t work out.
The end of one segment must be tied to the next one but I don’t get the parenting right since my chain seems to break when animating rotation/position properties. Is this maybe best for scripting or is there a tutorial for parenting for animating something like a worm/dragon/snake made of segments? Any hints?Karim
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3 Replies
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I’d be tempted to pre-comp a single pipe segment coming off the ship and reaching the seabed, then duplicate the precomp for each segment, just moving each along.
Hope that helps
Graham
https://www.quinceweb.com – web design
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Hard to say without seeing what you’re doing, but in general I’d move each segment’s anchor point to the left edge, and make each segment the child of the segment to its left. Only animate the positon of the head of the chain (changing positon of the other layers will break the chain). Do everything else by rotating the children. Something like that. 🙂
Dan
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Hi,
thanks for replying my post. I tried pre-comping and shifting the comps in time and position. But since its a movement which starts slowly with rotation, then gets faster with rotating back to zero and ends slowly on the seabed I can’t get the precomps to fit. So I always end up with “holes” in my pipeline. How would you do that?
Karim
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