Animation and Spline question

Animation and Spline question

With an object tracking to a spline, is there a way I can easily repeat a series of poses over and over again?

Example would be a butterfly flapping its wings... two poses... up and down and I want it to follow a spline.

Thanks in advance,
Mike Wheaton
 
No :-(

It would be nice if you could (say) use a smart folder to import an animation and set the smart folder's animation to loop.
 
scripting

Splines are scriptable. Are poses scriptable? I know takes are not.

Is there some way with scripting to resolve it?
 
I imagine you can do it with scripts, but it would be very ugly.

You could animate the figure as per normal, export as FBX, import into Blender, and then use Blender's NLA (non-linear animation -- it lets you layer and reuse "actions" -- the equivalent of Blender takes) to move to figure along a path with the original animation looping. The NLA is one of Blender's easier-to-use components.

Then, if necessary, export THAT as FBX back to C3D and render in C3D (if you prefer C3D's renderer).
 
Correction: there's no good way to import FBX animations into Blender (you can export but not import), so you'd need to do all the animation in Blender, but aside from that my suggested approach would work. (In fact my blog currently features a video of a model created and textured in C3D, animated in Blender, and then rendered in C3D).
 
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