Motion path in 3D - Beginner

Hi. I have been using, and enjoying, Fusion for a few weeks and have a basic question. Just for learning purposes I have an FBX model of an aircraft that I imported into Fusion and I naturaly want it to fly, to change heading, pitch and bank while following a path in XYZ.

About making paths, in the manual (Motion Paths section -> Poly Paths) it says;

'...4. Choose Path from the contextual menu for that control.'

I assume it means Polygon#:Polyline -> Publish -> Publish to Path? I can't find any other 'Path.' Well, it seems to work anyway but wanted to be sure I'm not missing something blindingly obvious. The manual later says that 'Insert and Modify' is Ctrl+I but it's Shift+I.

Anyway, I can make a path from a polyline and get an object to follow it with displacement in 2D, but of course I also want my model to move in Z. I found a comp posted by Chad Capeland a few years ago about this same topic in a thread titled 'Suggestions for future updates,' in which I can see roughly how it could work, but I haven't touched on expressions yet. Is expressions the best way to go for this situation? Or would it be easiest to just manually keyframe the whole thing? I'm interested in how those who know what they are doing would go about this in Fusion.

Also, I accidentally added a command to the Common Tools toolbar, after Rct. How do I delete it or reset the toolbar? Fortunately it asked me if I wanted to delete the entire toolbar!

Thanks for your time/help.
Steve.

I'm not an expert but from what i can see it's not possible to design a 3D path and attach it to a 3D shape animation.

The only way i could produce a 3D path was by keyframing the 3D object position in time, then the 3D path appeared in the viewer and i could manage it more or less like a 2D path by smoothing, deleting points and so on.
Then i tried to push it further (and miserably failed): to attach the target point of the 3D shape to a point computed on the "future" position of the translation point, so that i can keep the object aligned with the path heading.

I tought it were possible with expressions but didn't find anything related to "getting a locator coordinated based on time"

Edit: About removing a command from the toolbar... you need to open the toolbar customization form, then you can drag the icon from the toolbar and drop it out to remove. The drag operation is locked until you open the customization form.

Thanks for your efforts Umberto. Yeah, I will do it manually I think. I'm expecting Fusion to do things that it's not really designed for. We would all like a piece of software that does everything.

Thanks for the Toolbar info.

There are definitely ways to do this. I don't have the time right now to completely work out a demonstration, but basically what you want to do is animate the object you want to animate and then link the animation of the target of the object TO the object, but with an off-set so that the target follows the same trajectory, but a couple of frames earlier than your object. This will create heading/banking in your object. It's not super intuitive, but it works fine.

Also as soon as you create two keyframes the path appears in the viewport. This path can be manipulated in the viewport as well.

Hope this helps a little bit.

Thanks Sander. That's a great solution. It certainly makes it easier to describe the relative motions between velocity vector and inertial axis.

Thanks again.
Third time lucky at posting this over the last few days!