Making Caps on Animated Curves Better
This is a follow-up article on another one I wrote back in June on how to add rounded line-caps to curves in Blender, so pease go ahead and read that if you haven’t yet, or else this article probably won’t make much sense. I have since improved the method a little, especially the drawback of the caps being transformable and the cluttering of the Outliner.
To work around the caps being transformable by accident, I found out that adding Limit Location/Rotation/Scale constraints before the Follow Path constraint and checking the boxes for all axis and For Transform mitigates that. Please keep in mind that you have to set all the minimum values fot the Limit Scale constraint to 1.0, or else the cap will disappear.
Setting these constraints still allows the Follow Path constraint following them to transform the cap, but the user cannot, which means we can now parent them to the actual path we’re animating, freeing up valuable space in the Outliner.
Quick tip: if you want to duplicate your curve along with its caps, Ctrl+Click it’s icon in the Outliner, that will select the Curve and it’s children (the caps) for easy duplication.
I have also been hacking together a script for Blender 2.8 that automates everything. I haven’t really scripted anything in Blender for at least six years, so my code is still a little messy (and everything but user friendly), but if you’d rather select a curve with a bevel object and a cap-object and click a button than do everything manually, feel free to grab it here. Perhaps it could even serve as the base for an add-on, if someone is interested in developing that. Just make sure to credit where credit is due. ;)
And that’s already it. If I find the time for it, I might add some additional features to the script and perhaps even turn it into an add-on/operator myself, we’ll see. If you enjoyed this article and found it useful, you know what to do and if you didn’t it would be great if you could let me know why. Have fun adding and animating curves with caps in Blender! (Especially now that 2.8 is out officially.)
