animation - a character putting on an accessory

Support Basics & Interface
#1

I’m still trying to get the hang of animation. In a scene I am working on, a character picks up a pair of head phones, and puts them on. He’s all boned (I haven’t figured out mesh animation) with IK for the arms, hands, and the head. Ideally, I would like the mesh for the headphones to be controlled by the hand when he is picking them up, and the head once he has them on. Is there a way to do this? If I don’t join the meshes I have to line up the character and the headphones by eye, and it looks like they are moving in his hand as they go to his head, and they bounce around on his head once they are there. Is there a better way to do this?

Right now I have them always on his head, but I’d like to get the transition right.

#2

Maybe it you add two parent constraints, one to the hand bone, one to the head bone, and animate the influence value as ownership transfers?
I don’t know for sure.
Try it! let me know how it turns out!

#3

That sounds like a good idea. I didn’t know you could aniumate that. I’ll let you know. Thanks.

#4

Mind that you gotta press like “Show” or something like that in the constraint-window before you can animate it (it may be VERY obvious for you and others, but I almost burst into tears trying to animate them a while ago. Don’t want you to go through the same shit too).

Good luck man!

#5

Thanks,

If you didn’t metion that I probably would have ended up with a broken keyboard. :smiley:

#6

I haven’t done it myself but I believe you need copy location and rotation constraints and animate the influence of these.

Basically … Give the hand a copy location/rotation constraint to the hand and another to the head. Set both constraints to zero. As his hand touches, you animate the constraints from zero to one. From here on the headphones should stick with the hand until the influence is animated back to zero - at which point you animate the same constraints to the head.

It is probably best applied or tweaked with IPO curves. But as I said, I haven’t done it (must get around to it)