Hi, have been given a tut from elsewhere to do a small animation with 3 coloured balls. Most other people who did the tut did it in ver 4 for which it was written. However I cannot, no matter how much I try get it to work. Im fine up to the point I click Last Keystroke, and move the ball to the final destination. Apparently then I should get a line which is the path the ball moves on, but I get nothing. Here is an email from one of the other people who did the tut to give you an idea: Try with just one ball - after all you just want to make sure you can animate and the other balls are just eye candy. create the ball go into top view and move it back to the starting position click on animation set up put the 20 frames in and make sure the repeat is also ticked. I put the 20 in the second box from the top at the right click on last frame. Check if the mover on the line above has actually moved - if not move it over to the right as far as it can go.(I had to do it manually the first time) click on the ball and move it to its final position (you can tell if its working because there will be a line stretching back to the beginning position. If you can see the line click on play. Fingers crossed it works Once you have that working you can play with the animation (I used 30 rather than 20 for mine) After I had submitted mine Michial found that you can move the ball in a curve etc just by moving the line out to the side when you are making the key points Youy could even have the ball move in a complete circle by having the start and finish point the same and then move it out on the keypoints. If anyone can shed some light on where Im going wrong, much appreciated!

To have the ball move just make sure you are on frame 0. In the far lower right corner is a tiny triangle, click it and make sure autokey is checked (when you get used to animation you'll want to keyframe stuff manually for more control). Now move the time scrubber (the little blue capsule at the bottom of the screen) to the frame you want. Now select the ball and move it. The timeline should fill in with blue. Move back to frame 0 and click play and the ball will move. This will move the ball in a straight line. To make it curve do the same above then move the scrubber again to a frame further along then move the ball off to the side. To really learn about Bryce go to Amazon.com and order Real World Bryce 4 by Susan Kitchens. 99% of it works just as well for Bryce 5 only there is nothing about metaballs and trees in the book. 1000 pages of detailed info on everything in Bryce.

sorry for the silly question, but the problem is that you can't see the path line or that the ball doesn't move? If the problem is only in the path line, go in the attributes dialog of the object (press the A letter) and select the "show path" oprtion.

both the ball does not move once i play the animation, and everyone else sees a path line, and I dont, I followed your instructions but again got no path or no movement sigh oh btw I have actually bought that book, but Im waiting for it to arrive from Amazon, its 4-6 weeks shipping time to here and I have min 2 weeks to go. Thanks for the advice tho. Any advice on where to go for info on metaballs and trees while you mention it

metaballs and trees do a search on the forums, tons of info

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1029436

If you move an object in an animation it will move to the new position, but that is not creating a path. To create a path you open the create menu on top of the bryce control panel. Pick one that is about the shape you want and create it. See the image I attached. The red string is the path. the blue squares are the control points. Neither show up in the render window, only in the setup. You can reshape the path by dragging the blue control points around. The distance between each control point also controls the keyframes (speed) of the animation. Try to keep the length of red line between the blue squares about the same or your object will speed up in the animation. Once you have that look at the link I posted. It is an old thread about how to track invisible objects so you can pan during a scene. Hope this clears things up.

Hey thanks! I actually managed to figure out what the problem was after surfing the net for tuts and testing it. The tut I had was for ver 4 and for people who had done animations before. Im using a brand spanking new ver 5 and the tut finally worked after I turned AUTOKEY on, then it was fine. I also found how to do a path manually which was also good. But this Path thingy........oooh I didnt know about that, it looks quite cool! Thanks for the help folks, and good to see the book Ive paid quite a bit of money for, is recommended again :)

Did you turn on the auto-oh.

AUTOKEY!!! (hand slapping forehead) that was the problem.... he he thanks fr the advice

yup it was a silly simple thing like switching on the Autokey. But now I know LOTS more about animations than I did before hand :)

he he serendipity at it's best!

Hmmmm, I do beleive I stated in post 2 to make sure auto-key was on.

Attached Link: http://www.geocities.com/terragenblue/brycegall1.htm

yeah but i didnt know what it was, or more importantly WHERE it was to turn it on. I found a tut with PICTURES showing me, and lo and behold........ So while there are no animations, this is what I have done so far