Struggles in duplicating an object with a Follow Path constraint

In my short film about fungi, I need lots of spores randomly floating around the scene. So I made one original spore with a Follow Path constraint targeting a Bezier curve. This would allow it to be animated using the Offset Factor in the constraint panel. I thought I’d then make copies by writing a script to duplicate the original spore. Not so easy! It took forever to get it right. One each try, the spore copy was displaced somewhere on the screen and not lined up at the start of the curve copy as it should be.

This is what I had to do (also documented in the script file):

Steps:

1. Select the spore and flight path for duplication

2. Duplicate the spore and flight path objects

3. Disable the Follow Path constraint

4. Centre copied spores at world origin (0, 0, 0)

5. Move the duplicates to a new location

6. Enable the Follow Path constraint on the copied spore

I’ve attached the blend file and the python script. The spores are now ready for animation. Next step - maybe I’ll try to animate using a script. I’m using Blender 4.5.

2 comments