I did a few animations (manually) where I show where we are traveling from point A to point B on a model of the earth by drawing arcs and lines. This went well.
I now have about a hundred of these I have to do for different starting and ending locations. I think I could script it to speed up my work flow and "expand my horizon" to boot.
I started by creating some dummy objects and copying the bezier curves from the "by hand" animation to the dummy objects and then change the controller to a bezier script and referenced my by-hand animation. I scaled the bezier curve to be between 0 and 1 and then use a multiplier with start and end co-ordinates in the bezier scripts so and have got it to where the scripted animation matches the by hand animation. This should make subsequent similar animations a lot easier.
This seems to work well for the camera movement from Point A to Point B on the model.
So, in drawing the line/arc between point A and B I'm not sure what to do. I setup a working pivot and use that at the point where the arc touches the surface of the sphere and then the regular pivot is in the center of the sphere so the arc/line moves around the sphere when I move the arc with that.
This is more or less how I would animate manually, though.
I am having some trouble lining up the movement of the camera with the movement of the arc, though, and think maybe it would be "better" to also script the motion of the arc from Point A to Point B, so it is always running from the same numbers as the camera movements.
If I could fetch the co-ordinates of the point that is on the sphere and in the exact center of the camera's view at specific points on the timeline.. I think I could maybe handle it from there.
Anyone have any ideas? need more input?
Thanks very much