Curves and NURBS Plus motion pathing

Now we get onto the interesting stuff! so first off, we have to draw a curve (Modelling, Curves, draw curves, it's a pretty simple thing) and this curve will be showing the movement path of the snow speeder we're going to have fly off into the Imperial star destroyer!

But we just drew it flat as a 2d drawing, so, we want to select the curves, right click it and begin editing the curves vertices, allowing for rises and falls, or minor tweaks to the pathing if need be.

Now, for the parenting... First up, you select your object you want to move, then you select the curve (The object will always go from first point to last, so if you drew your curves backwards... Woops) Then you go into the animation path, Constain tab, motion paths, then attach to motion paths... And boom, you're done! Your object now follows the path dictated... And best part, it can be edited at any time!... Just... Be careful.

But now, we want a good camera angle while the ship is racing, so, we put the camera next to the mesh... Aim it the way we want... And we simply, parent it... And boom our camera follows the snow speeder!... But you can still turn and move it on it's own, but it's actions are now tied to the snow speeders.

And here's the foggy background!.. Which I will show, in my materials post!

This scene won't be in the final product and is just a test and a general experiment with curves and the scene as a whole.

Also, you can choose to edit the points of the curve directly, that way you can get the precise endpoints you want, instead of affecting the curves in a weird way.

In the actual Animation, the Snowspeeder is actually set to the motion path as in this test animation (Pathing is different obviously). But along this way I discovered a few vital pieces of information. For starters motion pathing is incredibly finicky if you're doing anything more complicated than a turn, or a snake like manoeuver. I know this because during the animation, there's a spiral part, where the snow speeder turns with the pathway, to give some style to the animation. But instead...

The snowspeeder at one point curves completely wrong and begins to move the ship in a completely wrong rotation. This was then resolved in post by masking this effect, But still, Motion pathing is more used for simple movements, Like running, driving and so on, not so much anything stylized.