I am trying to achieve a very simple effect in Blender, yet I can’t quite get it to work. The effect is virtually identical to what’s in the 1m28s mark of this video: balls traveling down a waterway, and then down a waterfall:
I first tried Particles being controlled by Physics, but those were way too erratic and messy. So, any ideas are welcome.
Take your physics setup and bake it. Then run simplify curves on those results to get the curves into fewer keyframe. Manually adjust this smaller keyframe set to fit your scene.
A particle tracer might be another way to go. Then you would have a real curve path in the scene that you could edit and have objects travel along.
I don’t think your first suggestion would be tenable. It just seems like it would take too long to attempt, and it would likely be unsatisfactory in the results. That’s my hunch.
But what is a “Particle tracer”? I came across this via a search, but that doesn’t seem applicable. Do you have a link to what you’re talking about?