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Most animation/motion graphics softwares have a feature to auto-orient an object according to its own motion path. So if you're animating something like a plane, that always points to where it's going (at least normally), you just animate the location of the object and the software automatically rotates the object in the direction it's currently moving. It's really useful in some situations.

Does Blender have this feature? How do I enable it?

Edit: I do not mean the "track to" constraint, used to make an object point to another object. I want the object to auto-orient in the direction itself is moving, so it's always moving "forward".

Alexandre Marcati
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  • By 'motion path' do you mean following a curve or do you mean motion due to hand animation? – Marty Fouts Oct 06 '21 at 20:29
  • I mean regular keyframe animation. For exemple, in 3ds max or after effects I can keyframe-animate the location of an object and enable the "auto-orient to motion" feature and then the object will always rotate in the direction it's moving, so it's always pointing "forward". Very useful and common feature, Blender must have it (I hope), I just don't know where to find it. – Alexandre Marcati Oct 06 '21 at 20:34
  • Alas, as far as I know, this is not something Blender can do. – Marty Fouts Oct 06 '21 at 22:26
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    I'm not sure it exists in Blender, you can do it with a Follow Path constraint though, you'll make the object follow a curve, and enable the Follow Curve option of the constraint – moonboots Oct 07 '21 at 05:48
  • To get past/future state into a driver, (which would seem necessary for this, drivers or not?) Rich Sedman has written a nice driver-function here – Robin Betts Jan 13 '22 at 18:59
  • Some workaround with Geometry Nodes ... https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/244606/2214 – vklidu Feb 02 '23 at 23:02

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If you don't mind using animation nodes (+ the add-on extension from 3D Singh VFX: https://github.com/3DSinghVFX/animation_nodes), you can do it by subtracting the current position from the old position and this is then your rotation vector. Of course you could do it also via python.

Here is the node setup:

enter image description here

Note: this works only for position changes. I don't know what happens if you animate rotation of that object too....

Note2: of course you could also slice the list so that it doesn't grow to much ;)

result:

enter image description here

Chris
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  • Thank you! I hope Blender adds this as a constraint type in the future, but for now I'll use the animation nodes as you suggest. Thanks again – Alexandre Marcati Oct 07 '21 at 17:56
  • You are welcome. I had fun making it – Chris Oct 07 '21 at 17:57
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    Nice.. (Maybe I should stop resisting learning AN in the hope that GN will eventually do) To handle a delta rotation, on top of motion-direction, I guess you could parent the object to an Empty, and guide the Empty with AN? – Robin Betts Jan 13 '22 at 18:58
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you can draw paths: add > path > edit mode > vertex > E key to extrude eatch vertex to draw the path...

I followed this tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oD3gSX3ICM to make this video https://twitter.com/famecans2/status/1408921903838990338.

finally there is an option in the camera properties to guide it along the path.

FiMiS
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