animate a conveyor belt I´m trying to make a conveyor belt, but haven't found any useful guide so far.

So.. is there a way to first make an array for the wood plank and then make all the planks follow a path?
I don't want to parent 100 different objects just to make this animation.

I would prefer to be able to use a path rather then a bezier curve since I want to be able to have different elevation in different sections of the conveyor belt and find it hard to edit a bezier curve. And I also don't want the planks to deform as they reach the edges between sections of the loop.

Thanks in advance!

Best regards
/John
One technique that might be useful is to turn the motion of a single plank into an NLA strip that repeats in a track.  Then you put that same action into a repeating NLA strip into a track on each other plank, but offset in time, so it follows the same path, but a second or so later than the plank in front of it.



I optimized my workflow by setting up the repeating strip before duplicating the object with Alt-D.  Then all I had to do was grab the strip in the NLA and G X -10