Need hints or pointers for exporting "Follow Path" animations

I’m using Blender and a few meshes uses the Follow Path constraint. In the export, they don’t animate. Any pointers or hints in creating keyframes for the mesh to animate?

I’d appreciate it.

@JCPalmer is our Blender master and maybe @PirateJC might have some ideas.

On my side I am still way to new to blender :slight_smile:

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Yes, they are not exported. They might be implemented in some fashion right now in BJS, but I have neither looked at whether it is representable in JSON / .babylon, nor how it would match up with Blender’s implementation.

I do not know how to bake mechanically. Youtube is your go to place for blender.

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The best “hack” that I know of to handle this looks something like this:

  1. Add an “empty” node to your scene.
  2. Parent your mesh to that empty node
  3. Have the empty node follow the path
  4. Bake the animation to the “empty” node.
  5. Delete the path
  6. Export mesh (with “empty” node parent)

Essentially what that does is “transfer” the animation from the path to the empty node which can be exported normally.

Hope that helps a bit!

@JCPalmer : I think actually both the camera and a light in that little demo were parented to a cube and then the cube was animated along the curve and baked out.

@pseudoCK : It was done with Blender 2.76, I believe - so a while back. You might want to take a look at this video for Blender 2.8+ :

Blender 2.8 Set Up a Camera Rig and Animate On A Path

Stay Safe, gryff :slight_smile:

I deleted a post, not really sure how. Links to .blend

scene

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@JCPalmer : TY Jeff for new Links :slight_smile:

Stay Safe, gryff :slight_smile:

Sorry I am late to my own topic, like 3 months late. I did somehow found a solution to do path animations in Blender and able to export them in Babylon.js

First I did was create an empty Blender file and import the animated path and mesh into the new, blank scene. Then I tested it to see if it I got all the animation done then exported that scene (the second blender file) as an FBX. Import the FBX into the main scene and export to Babylon.js. The animation dots are filled in and are exportable into Babylon.js

It’s sounds complicated but it works.