[Issue] Aligning motion paths

[sportember]

Hi,

I am trying to add custom animations to a grouped object (a lot of objects grouped into one object). I create the group, add the motion path, say, I set the object to move to the right. The motion path vector is placed into the slide, but when I start a slide show, the object "jumps" a bit at the start of the animation. It seems that the motion path vector does not begin at the centre of the object.

Can anyone tell me a method to place the motion path vector in such a way that the animation does not get jumpy? How can I set the beginning of the motion path vector at the centre of an object group?

Another question is how can I position a second motion path vector to start exactly at the end of a first motion path?

I am quite interested in these questions...

Regards,
sp

[acknak]

I don't see any way to do this accurately with ease.

You can get "close enough" if you draw an X and give it the same center position as the group object, then (visually) align the motion path to the X.

Turn on "Edit Points" to get handles at the exact endpoints of the motion path.

It's a mess.

[sportember]

Yes, acknak's solution is a something-like-solution, but neither easy, nor truly precise. But I really hope that we miss something, and there is a way to align motion paths... but I don't have any idea yet.

Also, the problem of two or more motion paths aligned into a series of motions seems quite difficult to solve.

I came up with the idea of designing everything from the beginning based on the grid, but that is in some way complete loss of freedom, which problem free software has born to solve .

So any ideas or solutions are still welcome!

Or should we file a bug report instead?

[acknak]

I don't see anything in the issue tracker for this--it definitely seems like a huge gap in the usability of the feature, and many people were asking for the "move along a curve" feature, so I expect there will be similar demand for this.

Can someone file an enhancement request?
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[sportember]

I have created an issue on the topic:
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=91277