[REQUEST] Distance based displacement

When animating an object on a Path the displacement does not take into account the length of the Path.

This means that a linear displacement does not necessarily mean a linear speed.

Even if it might be problematic or inconsistent to have this as an option, at least a resampling of the polyline into same length pieces or anything other that results in linear speed would be great.

Just gave it a try.

It seems that if you animate a path in the view while at a specific point in time,
you create some sort of a time/position-lock in the spline view.
When you first animate e.g. the start- and end-position,
and then modify the path in the viewer,
there are no additional points in the Splineview other than start and end,
and the animation is 'normalize' (if this makes sense....)

[daniel.koch]

When animating an object on a Path the displacement does not take into account the length of the Path.

It does do that, at least for me.

If you create a path with only start and end points, the displacement spline has corresponding points at 0.0 and 1.0. If you add a point to the path in the middle, a corresponding displacement point is added at 0.5. If you move that middle point closer to the start or the end, shortening or lengthening the first path segment, the displacement point's value changes towards 0.0 or 1.0. That seems to me what you're asking for?

This means that a linear displacement does not necessarily mean a linear speed.

Again, this works for me. If I have a straight line through all displacement points, i.e. with all displacement spline segments having identical slope, I get a constant speed along the path.

To make this easier to achieve, you can select points on the path and, from the image view's Polyline submenu, untick the Lock Points option. This decouples the path points and corresponding displacement spline points, allowing full freedom to reshape the displacement spline as desired (e.g. delete the displacement spline points altogether and make the entire spline linear, for constant speed along the whole path). Relocking the path points will recreate the corresponding displacement spline points at the appropriate distance values along the path.