Surface Constraint? - Constrain One Object to Another During Animation

So I've been doing some more mechanical animations for work and tried to figure out a way to get my suction cup tool to stick to the surface of my clear lens as it bends and flexes. I've already animated this manually by adjusting the suction cup tool position / rotation and creating a keyframe on each frame (edit: I actually went back and pruned them to every fifth frame, but the idea is the same). Basically a stop motion type of animation recording. While this isn't really all that hard, it does take some time. Also it's not very easy to adjust after the fact if I need to.

I've tried the Orient Constraint Tag, Parent Constraint Tag, Target Tag and a few of the spline scripts from Hiroto (although I'm probably not using them correctly). Making the suction tool a child of the spline doesn't work either. Since I'm doing point animation on a spline that's extruded and has a shell for thickness, I don't know if it's even possible. But there may some other method that would work with an actual mesh or parametric shape. I'm attaching a C3d file with a small snippet of the animation. Some of the other objects and textures were removed to keep the file size down.

If anyone has any other ways of going about this, I'd love to hear them. This sort of procedure comes up a lot for me in the stuff I have to animate.

Thanks everyone for taking the time to look!

Simon
 

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Hi Simon.
I´m not sure right now how to help - but looking at your keyframes raises the idea to reduce the sheer amount by using spline interpolation for example to go from here:
Stopanimation.jpg

to here:
SplineInterpol.jpg

without loosing any info and win some clarity+simpleness.
Cheers
Frank
 
As always, thanks for the reply Frank. I noticed that too, but I had a hard time adjusting the the curve to have everything line back up exactly. Did you just eyeball where it went, or did you remove a point at a time and adjust as you go? I know that it probably won't be as noticeable if the tool isn't perfectly lined up with the clear lens, since the camera is behind the suction tool. But I will eventually run into a situation where it will be seen more readily.

The suction tools attached to flat clear lenses are a lot easier to keep in sync. It's more of an issue with these bending, rotating, flexing inserts. I'll play around with this method some more. Danke.
 
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