Any help with Orienting/Aligning elements to Path

[Jason Burnett]

Apparently in After Effects, there is a concept of a motion path that allows you to align an object or several objects to a path. The path can even come from Illustrator. This allows you to move an object from one end of the path to another regardless of how the path is drawn. When moving along a curved path, your element can be made to orient itself in tangent to the path as though it were a car driving along a curved path.

I haven't been able to find anything like this in Illustrator. I have a string of "leaf" images that need to be attached to a vine. The vine needs to wrap around a couple of other elements. I need to be able to orient my leaf items by their tail and attach that tail to the vine. Then, when the vine curves, the leaf is rotated to accommodate the curve.

If you think anout how type is oriented to a path, this would be the same thing, just with objects, not letters. Surely someone has done this, I just can't find it. 

Is there any such plugin or does anyone have any idea how to make this happen?

Thanks in advance.

[Monika Gause]

Are those leaves all copies of the same leaf?

In that case you could use a blend. Or a scatter brush.

[Jason Burnett]

I was just mentioning that there are a lot of different leaves. Thanks for responding so fast, you got here before I could post that part. I may try doing it this way with symbols and then expand the paths and replace the symbols. I was just hoping there was another way. Thanks again for replying.

[Jason Burnett]

Oh, and a couple of things to start:
About Blending:

I have tried to blend along a path, but that creates a bunch of identical leaves. I want to have a bunch of different types of leaves that somehow snap to and orient to the path I have selected. Equal distribution of leaves along the path is also not a great look. Though this can be adjusted somewhat with spline replacement for a blend, it suffers from the fact that all of the items on the path have to be identical or nearly identical. 

About Brushes:

I have tred the brush trick by asigning my leaf elements as a brush that I can paint a path with and though I have had similar luck to the blend method, it again suffers from the fact that it's only one kind of leaf along the path. I have several kinds of leaves that I have to generate to match an old image. In total there are hundreds of leaves that change shape and properties. 

The Goal

What would be ideal is to be able to select a group of elements on the artboard then click the path to establish it as the key element (think alignment panel). Then click a button that either a) aligns them to the path without rotating them to fit the path or b) aligns them to the path, rotating them to make sure the remain in tangent to the path. 

Of course, this would set the stage for the "distribute along path" function that could either distribute the objects selected along the path based on their size or distribute the spacing/overlap between tthe objects based on how much space was available in total.

And in fantasy land, what would be really perfect is if it had "randomize distribution" or "eased distribution" or "functional distribution" which would do the same for aligning along the path, but would randomize the spaces, or align them relative to one of the easing methods (think exponential alignment) or even better would be to let you pick from a lilst of functions that determined the spacing from a "functions library" of sorts.

Some further fantasyland options would be the ability to sort and filter items along a path. It would be alignment, orientation (optional) filtering, sorting, and distribution. So you could select a series of boxes of different sizes and Distribute along path, using Filters (only boxes of a certain size/color), sorted (smallest boxes first), and distribute them by distribution method (exponential) with no spacing. Then you could save this alignment formula for use in other projects by one click. Man, I wish I knew how to write a plugin. 

[Monika Gause]

If you're looking for magic, try the Astute Graphics plugins (not for free)

https://astutegraphics.com/plugins/stipplism