The Follow Path Constraint Is So Powerful | Blender Tutorial

hello guys and welcome back to another quick tutorial today I'm going to be showing you a very powerful animation technique in blender and that is simply how to make any object of your choice follow a curve these little arrows here I just added them in for effect but you don't need them simply you just need an object of your choice and then a curve so you can see here I have a stingray in this example and I'm going to show you step by step how to set us all up not with a stingray but I'm going to show you how to do this all I'm going to show you how to easily add in a curve how you can manipulate it how to consider the direction of the curve and also we're going to look at some of the parameters of the curve so like for example the length of time you want your object to go around a curve so all of those things are going to be packed into this neat little tutorial and it should be something that's going to be very beneficial to your animation inside of blender so let's jump in and I hope you guys enjoy okay so what we're going to do is set up a quick little scene here so let's go shift a let's add in the Suzanne monkey head it's a little bit more interesting and we're going to select the default Cube and just delete it and uh what I'm going to do I'm just going to right click and go Shades move and let's just get straight to the actual um curve animation so we need to add in a curve first of all so we're going to go shift a and the best curve to use is the bezier curve so I'm going to go ahead add that in and over here you can see we have the bezier curve and I'm just going to scale Suzanne down a bit and just move her up somewhere here so now we can see the curve here we're just going to tab into edit mode and we can grab these handles here to control the curve you have one here and one here but if you want to you can also go ahead and press e to extrude and you can press R to rotate like so and you can manipulate these little Handles in 3D space and this way you can put a curve wherever you want you can even delete the whole curve and then while you're still in edit mode you can go here to the Dual curve tool and then just draw a curve you can literally draw your own animation if you wanted to okay so the idea here is we just need a curve okay it doesn't matter how you shape it but we want the monkey head now to go along this curve so the way we do it you select the object that you want to do this to you're going to go over to your constrained object constraint properties I'm going to click on ADD object constraint and then go to follow path so you've added to follow path then you're going to click on little eyedropper and then select the path in this case it's the bezier curve so just click on that and now if you come here to animate path and you click on that you can now come to frame one or whatever hit the space bar and it's going to follow along now this is kind of okay but the problem is it's not realistic because the monkey head is not following along so what you're going to do is going to come here go and go to follow curve so now if we go to frame one here hit the spacebar it's going to also follow the direction of the curve now if you want to influence the rotation here what you could do is you can come to these things here so you can change the different axes and try different ones and depending on where your object is pointing to where you have it placed this could be different so in my case it looks like Z is the best option and I could use something like in this case I'm just quickly going to hide it here and I can see here if I tab into edit mode I'm going to rotate the monkey head just 90 degrees on the Z so if I turn it back on it's facing the way I want in this case it's not so I might come here and try the X you could just experiment around in this case the monkey is facing the way I want you can also just move Suzanne as well or whatever your object is you can see this little blue line that's your constraint line so you can place this wherever you want and it'll automatically follow the curve now there's one more thing we need to look at here because what if you have an animation that's 300 frames long and you want it to run for that long in this case you can see it only goes 100 frames so what you do you're going to select a curve object you're going to go to your object data properties for the curve and then you're going to go here to path animation and over here you can set the frame so in this case I'm going to set it to 300 and now it'll go the full duration of my timeline here and this is the way you can control the sort of thing and you can see here now that's happening I can grab it at any point and I can come here and adjust this and this is a very powerful tool so if you have like a point a and a point B so I'll just quickly put this little sphere here maybe that's my point a and this is my point B this is kind of a cool way you can do this also just one more thing before I forget I almost forgot to mention this if you go in to your animation path and you want to know which direction it's heading what you can do is go over inside of edit mode go to your overlays and then enable the handles down here for the normals and now you can actually see the direction that it's going um so if you didn't like that for example you could delete and then you can come in here and you can just draw it a different direction if you needed to you can see what's happening here so just important to mention that directional bit so now you can see Suzanne is going the other way so I'll see you guys next time for another tutorial

Channel: PIXXO 3D

Views: 53,150

Keywords: blender tutorial, how to model in blender, how to use blender, blender, blender tutorial for beginners

Id: i0XQXEUO1-I

Length: 5min 15sec (315 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2023