motion guide not working

[Liz]

Hi all,
I'm having trouble getting a very simple motion guide animation to work. The
guide is a smooth segment of a circle, nothing long or complicated, but the
tweened item just refuses to follow it and goes in a straight line from
start to end. I've checked that it's snapped to both ends, I've checked that
the motion guide layer is really a motion guide layer, I've even tried
putting an extra keyframe halfway through the motion tween and snapping the
object to a point halfway along the curve, but that just gives me two
straight segments.
I've checked the archives and a number of people seem to have had this
problem intermittently, and these are the only suggestions that have been
made. I've done plenty of motion tweens with motion guides before and never
encountered this problem. What could I be doing different?
Thanks,
Liz

[Unregistered]

I've just dealt with a similar issue, and discovered one possible reason you might be having the problem.

I find that when I'm working within the instance of a symbol that's already on the stage, the pen and shape tools sometimes don't quite work right. I can draw a perfectly smooth looking motion path, but upon closer inspection the path has tiny gaps and oddities where the anchor points are. This causes the line to lose all function as a motion guide, resulting in the asset simply marching along in a straight line rather then following the guide.

When I'm having this issue, I just make sure to go though the library to get to the symbol I want to edit, and draw the motion paths in that way - this seems to solve the issue. Anchor points no longer magically 'drift' and the shapes remain whole and continuous.

I suppose it would also be safe to paste a motion path drawn in Illustrator when editing though an instance on the stage, however.

[Husein_Poonawala]

Try putting in more frames in between...
perhaps you dont have enough empty frames for the motion tween. The circle might be moving along the path but it doesn't appear that way due to not enough frames in between.

Husein Poonawala