I've been experimenting again with Bryce 4 animation capabilities. And I somewhat successfully got a piston and crankshaft to work and used the resulting .bmp sequence to generate an animated .gif using Animation Shop 2. I may post a link later on... Anyhow I guess it's not possible to constrain something to a path and have it follow another object at the same time using parent child object relationships. So I had to animate the up-down motion of the cylinder separately. I'm using tracking on the connecting rod part for it's orientation between the crank and the piston. Still seems like the connecting rod slips a bit inide the piston (probably has something to do with the origin of the tracked object.) But the bit of offset error isn't too big a deal since I'm just experimenting. Also if anyone remembers that airplane model I considered selling... Well, I managed to sell two of 'em. Five more and I'll be able to use those funds to buy the print version of 'rosity. (At least that's my plan for now.)Woohoo! LOL! Any ideas for unique vehicle models that might sell? Perhaps a 1920's - 1930's era gyroplane? I'm thinking of doing one of those. Other than that, I recently invested a fresh (as in pristine) looking copy of RWB4 with the CD-rom. I was suprised that the bookstore actually had it on the shelf. It was $50 something, but definitely a worthwhile investment. Just something interesting to read when I'm not doing anything else.

The path can be linked to an onject to follow it or even constrained to another path. Then whatever is on the first path will also follow.