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Parent Dragging Child Along Path
Hi,
I asked about this problem earlier but I\m trying to formulate it another way. I\m working on an animation with rows of fishes swimming along curved paths. The fishes become smaller as the approach the center of the animation. My problem is, that I don\t want the distance between the fishes to increase!
I was thinking that maybe I can create a “train” of fishes were the first fish, the “parent”, is dragging the “children” along the path. But, how can I align a layer to a path without any position keyframes? I don’t want position keyframes for the “children” since the position is going to be decided by the position of the parent .
best –
Wilhelm
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4 Replies
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The distance between the fish is not increasing as AE sees it. The distance between the anchor points remains the same so, to AE, the fish look to be the same distance apart. However, since we humans see the whole fish image – not just an anchor point – the fish look farther apart.
How is the comp set up? How are the fish getting smaller? How are they placed along the path? Perhaps somewhere in your setup we can find a quick and easy solution.
– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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Hi and thanks for your fast reply!
In the middle of each coloured area there is a vector path created in Illustrator. I pasted one of these paths onto a Fish layer to create a Motion Path. I aligned the orientation of the fish to the path, and scaled it down with a series of keyframes, to make sure that it’s within the contour lines of the coloured area. Then i duplicated the Fish layer, including the motion paths, 20 times, and sequenced the layers in time to give the impression of a row of fish. But because of the scaling the distance between the fishes seem to increase as their size decreases.
Maybe I could get around this problem with some parenting or precomposition tricks. I don\t want to create a 3D path, because the tweeking would be endless to make the fishes fit into their areas.
best-
Wilhelm
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You’d have to tweak the speed of the fish moving toward the middle; they’ll have to get slower as they go.
What you could do, instead of tweaking, then redoing all the duplication, is to put the fish with all its attributes into a precomp then duplicate and offset the precomp. That way any change you make will already be reflected in the duplications.Or, how about make the fish a 3d layer and instead of messing with scale, just push it further away.
Those are just two ideas; I’m sure somebody who’s better than I at expressions will be able to think up something more efficient.
– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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thank you.
I didn\t think about precomposing the fish, that will help a lot as i tweak the easy in settings untill the fishes are aligned properly! I/m not sure wheasther or not it will work to push the fish away in 3D space since they are aligned to that path… but Ill try!
best /
Wilhelm
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