Symbols following a line

[Cabbagehead]

Ok so I try to explain this to the best of my abilitys.

Basicly I have multible charakters whos arms are mode out of a bunch of balls.

I made a line that I could animate frame by frame ore maybe by form transformation.

But I need the balls to stay on the line when I move it.

Does anyone have a good hint that could nudge me in the right direction.

I am still a bit unsure how to tackle this myself, so any help would be appreciated.

-Cheers

[n. tilcheff]

I'd suggest you look into custom brushes.

Or a combination of a custom brush and a Smart Magnet Rig.

[Cabbagehead]

I tried that but I don't think you can make the balls overlapp when making a pattern brush.
It also seems to get rid of the the gradiant I added to it recently. I alos treid the bone tool, but I guess that would get to messy.

Thank you for the suggestion tho.

[_keyframer]

So you want to bend the stroke and have the circles follow correct?

I just tried setting up a stroke as a guide and each circle as a symbol on their own layers and linked to the guide layer. But moving the stroke didn't make the balls follow the stroke automatically.
See my attached screencapture...

[Cabbagehead]

That could be one way to do it.
The thing is the arms I am working on have A LOT of balls (insert joke here). 
I could do it like that but re aranging would probably take some time. But I will give it a shot.
Thank you for extra making a video. 

I can allways go back to just making the arms in illustrator and make the animation frame by frame and not using tweens.

Again Thank you.

[_keyframer]

You're welcome. You can always do what I did with keyframing - or use tweens, then convert to keyframes and adjust again. I often use tweens to get some motion quickly before going back in and converting tween spans to keys and fine-tuning.