Path Bone Motor

Overview

Path Bone Motor allows the user to animate bones by making them follow a user defined spline path.

Installation Requirements

This motor can be installed on a bone or a sequential bone chain.

Usage

A user defined path must be first created in the Path tab in Animation mode. After that, either select a single bone or a sequential bone chain to install the motor.

You can stretch out the layout of the bones along the path if they are squashed together by setting the scale parameter. Speeding up/slowing down the path motion is achieved via the speed parameter.

Use the keepLength parameter to do length preservation along the motion path if required.

Animatable Properties

• angle This determines the angle in degrees which the bones are pointing at.

• keepLength A max value of 100 will preserve the bone lengths but the bones might not adhere to the path perfectly. Try values between 0 to 100 for some stretching/compression effects but at the same time have some effective bone length preservation.

• offsetX This determines the x offset of the bones from the path.

• offsetY This determines the y offset of the bones from the path.

• scale This stretches out the bones along the path. Tweak it to make the initial bones not too squashed up together.

• speed This determines how fast the bones traverse along the path.

• timeOffset This determines the initial bones start out along the path.

• manualPathTime If this value is < 0 it is inactive. When the value is >= 0, it is active. A value of 0 means you will be at the beginning of your entire motion path. A value of 100 means you will be at the end of your entire motion path. In other words, if you set keyframes for manualPathTime, you will be able to jump, reverse etc. the path motion however you please.

Static Properties

• path This is the path that the motor will follow. Click on the button to assign motion to a different path.