Considering we're now keeping track of multiple parts of the ball, we now have to look at multiple motion paths.
Is there a quicker way to swap between viewing the motion bath of the body bone and the squash bone? In my case it's the top squash bone. I have calculate, clear, and update motion paths set to my quick favourites, but it's almost a bit cumbersome to have to clear one and then calculate another each time I want to view one another.
In other cases this might be fine, but it's a bit visually confusing to differenciate the two when they're both enabled as they are ontop of eachother. I'm sure intuition comes into play when we get more experience, but for now are there any suggestions?
You can select multiple bones and calculate all of them at once. Also you don't have to clear it. You can calculate one bone then select another bone and calculate it. it will keep the motion path for other bone(s). In newer version of blender you can choose update all to update all motion paths. If you choose update it only updates the bones paths for the ones selected. Hope that helps.
Forgot to mention that you can also set custom colors for each path. Under display check custom color. It will only change the color of the actively selected bone.
Left is how it looks by default, and right is after changing the colours. It does help, however I feel (with as much experience animating as I have so far) that I'd have an easier time if the motion paths settings could be be visible only when the bone is selected, and if I deselected a bone the path would not be visible. I'm more just thinking about how to speed things up when working.
However, situations like this where an object with multiple ctrl bones moves on a single straight axis is probably not likely to occur enough to require what I'm wanting to do with the visibility of the motion paths
Hi Harris, it's time for you to start looking at the geometry and not the individual paths ;)
Look at the whole shape first (silhouette) and then the paths only when you need to for specific points. This will let you leap frog one of the learning crutches stages.
There are some onion skinning tools that will assist you in seeing this, but in my view, if you're trying to improve your speed, spend a bit of time now training your eye to see the geo moving from frame to frame now, and this will pay dividends much sooner because you won't need to lean so heavily on the tools ALL the time. You will be able to SEE it, and then just check the tricky stuff with the tools.
This might seem counter intuitive, but I hope it makes sense.
Good point Wayne. I personally have never used motion paths except when following the rig an RC Truck course you did.
Harris to answer your last question, in this situation I'd used around frame instead of range. You could also set 1 bone to 2 step with 10 frames and the other to 3 step with 15 frames.