I am working on an animation in which there are three beams connected to to each other - a main lift beam, a t-beam connector, and a horizontal beam. The horizontal beam at its rest position is positioned within a slot comprised of two walls as shown in the image below:
I have placed a dummy/helper point on one end of the beam as shown in the image, and drew a simple spline line mimicking the shape of the slot.
I am trying to find a way to animate the beam so that it/its dummy point follows the spline using the "nearest" function. However, I only need the beam/point to follow the spline path for maybe 300 frames in the beginning of my animation, which has a total of 8000 frames - the animation values after the initial 300 frames are keyed into the various curve editors for the scene.
Is there a way for me to get this animating along the spline for a specific amount of frames?
When I have tried to link the dummy point to the path it takes the full 8000 frames to go from the bottom of the path to the top - I'd like it to follow the path for 300 frames, then key in animation values that I need into my curve editor until frame 7500 or so, and then have the beam/dummy point follow the path again in reverse from top to bottom for another 300 frames.
Any ideas on how to achieve that?
I'm thinking the "nearest" function might help best but so far I haven't been able to get it to work.
Thank you!
