I made a small animation almost a week ago where my character pushes over a cube…
She was rigged with the instructions from the BSoD/Introduction to character animation rig…
Then to keep her hands still and in one place while she pushes I rigged her arms almost the same way as the feet by adding a IK Solver to her arm…
This worked like a charm and I pretty much got the effect I wanted…
I then moved on and tried animating the same type of movement with Ludwig and Mancandy, but now I’m stumped… Do I need to modify the rig manualy to do the same thing or is there a better way to achieve this?
If anyone wants to look at the animation or blend file please let me know…
Well after scrutinizing Ludwig’s rig for a while I found a solution to my problem…
First of I found that you can use the shoulders and hips to move Ludwig without moving his arms… But I could not quite animate the poses I wanted to easily…
So I disconnected IK_Arm.l and IK_Arm.r from the Torso… And voila when you move the torso the hands stay at the same position… Which worked great for animating Ludwig pushing over a very large block…
So if you are a noob like me and sometime run into this same problem I really hope this post helps.
Another thing I would like to know is… After I have finnished animating Ludwig pushing over the cube… Is there a way to parent the IK_Arm.l and IK_Arm.r to the torso again?
Can the parenting be worked into the animation process as well?
there isn’t a switch parenting on and off, but there is a copy location constraint which has an Influence that can be keyed. So, constrain the ik empties to copy the location of the rig, offset of course, with an influence of 1. When you want the ik to stick on the cube, key the influence to 1 the frame before, and then move to the next frame, change the slider to 0, and key it again.
Actually, if you rig with the ChildOf constraint instead of a “hard” Parent/Child relationship, you can turn it off by animating the influence slider of the constraint. This is my new way to have characters pick things up, stick to stuff, etc.