Characters picking up and releasing objects?

Is there a way to get characters to pick up objects and releasing without having to keyframe the child object’s movement in relation to the movement of the character’s hand. I know you can vertex parent the child object to the parent, but can you undo that action on an animation timeline?

you should have a look for Slikdigit’s constraint trick (sorry, I don’t have a link) in the Q&A forum. He explains how to turn a contraint on and off during and animation. Using this trick, you could have an empty permanently parented to the armature and contraint the object to Copy Loc / Copy Rot of the Empty, turning those contraints On when you need them.

This sounds challenging enough, so I’ll try to make an example file.

Martin

Check out Joeri’s constraints_Ipo.blend that comes with
the demo225 files – it uses a constraint IPO to do
exactly what you want.

Chris

I did an example file: http://www.clubinfo.bdeb.qc.ca/~theeth/TemporalParent.blend

Martin

Thanks. I’ll give that a try.