I want to duplicate an object along with it's animation but I want to use the duplicated object(s) somewhere else in the scene. Is this possible? I guess I would need to maintain the animation locally to the duplicated object but not sure how that works.
For example a ball rolling on it's x-axis is duplicated with it's animation. I want to move that duplicated ball so that it is the same animation but rolling on the y-axis.
One way is with a DupliGroup:
Group your object(s) with ⎈ CtrlG
Add a dupligroup with ⇧ ShiftA> Group Instance > name of your group.
This will create an empty which represents the origin point (0,0,0) of the space in which the duplicated group resides. By transforming this empty, you can transform the dupligroup:
Dupliobjects use instancing, which means this will also be very memory efficient.
Duplicate the object in question and then use Delta Transform in the object panel. This will displace the object in any axis wanted and retain the original animation.
Relocate an animated object is very easy:
Suppose that you want to offset the position by 3 Blender units on the Z axis:
select it, go to the graph editor, select the blue z location channel, turn on the arrow near to the little phantom in the header (view only selected curve keyframes), toggle A to select all keyframes, G Y 3 Enter.
About setting an x-axis movement transformed in an y-axis movement, you should cut the keyframes from the x location channel, and paste them in the y location channell: I don't think there is this kind of option, you should have a little Python script. Anyway, selecting both channels, it's very easy to do the job by hand.
AFAIK the location keyframes are always referred to the world, not local.
