I have a rigged human and a car with a manual transmission.
What’s the best way to parent / drive / constrain the gear shift?
The gear shift - right now - is a mesh and a single bone armature. Obviously I want the tail to stay in place, and the head to be controlled by the human’s hand.
Thanks,
Cal
hum, wouldn’t that be more simple if the IK hand was parented to the gear ?
Then you animate the gears and the arm will adapt to the gear’s position ?
But, what about those moments when the hand is not on the gear shift?.. you know, smoking a ciggie, flippin’ the bird, etc.?
hum, you shouldn’t do that while driving !
The way it’s done in general, is that the car is rigged, the character is rigged as well.
Both are considered “asset” to your project, which might contains a bunch of shots.
Then for each shots you take all the needed asset into a .blend file and add a few more constraints depending on what is happening on the shot.
you’ll use a child of constraint to parent the IK hand to the gear, and animate the influence of that constraints if you need the hand to not be constrained for the whole duration.
But sure, if in one shot the character is talking at the phone, throwing it , then taking a cigarette, activating the gear, and throwing the cigarette through the windows, then you have a complex shot to animate for sure !
It might be best to do some tests before doing the final , since these kind of shots are never super easy to work with.
This is how I would do it:
That way the hand will stick to the gear shift and you will only need to animate the gear shift, everything else will follow along. You’ll still be able to animate the hand rotating around the gear shifter to push it forward or pull it backward.
Randy
Pretty much the opposite of what I am doing so far.
I’l keep playing with it.
Thanks y’all,
Cal
Yes ! What you do seems more natural and intuitive for sure !
but some stuff are better done the other way around.
Like a character sweeping with a broomstick, or doing weight training with dumbbells.
Instinctively we might want to reproduce the reality, it’s the arms/hands that drives the props.
But it’s much easier to constraints the IK arms to the props, animate the props and you get a great deal of the arms movement for free. Plus it’s quite easy to control where the broomstick is going and it’s general move.
You can see a quick example here on one of my rig demo, to see how much movement you can get for free :
Have fun !