I’m attempting to animate a dragonfly flitting around a tree and have a small pre-animation before he lifts off into flight. The actual flight uses a path constraint but when I attach the group (Dragonfly parts) to the path it means that all the animation will play at the start of the path rather than starting on the branch. Is there any way for me to ‘stall’ the path constraint? Or do I have to move the path along the branch as well key framing the percentages of the path it follows?

If this question is clear please say so and I’ll attempt to clarify but basically all I want to know is if Im able to have the beginning animation (0-89) and then it start the path constraint (90-onwards)

Thanks ahead of time but the quicker the answer the better, thank you!

Remove the constraint from the butterfly.
Create a Dummy and apply the path Constraint to that. Ahdust the start and end frames by dragging the keys to where you need them.
Apply a Link constraint to the butterfly and link it to the world at frame 0, the dummy at the frame where it starts moving and back to the world at the end of the path.

A couple of points.
Groups are not good where animation is concerned. Better to have a dummy with all the parts linked to it - they will follow the dummy but can also be animated separately.
Link Constraints can be tricky to set up - see this thread (to save me typing it all again ;) ).

Max 4.2 through 2013.
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