How to make my character 'hold' somthing?

Hi!

I tried to do an animation, and i had a problem with making my 3d man hold objects.
well, i tried to do it with parent (to his hand bone), but then it occurred to me that i cant use parent for small part of the animation- if i delete the parent after x frames, the parent will be deleted for all the frames. It means that i cant make my man hold objects, then put them aside, them make other character take this object etc.

i hope you can help me.

(sorry for my english)

There might be a better way of doing this, but I’ve found success with this method.

Instead of just parenting the object to the hand bone, position the object where you want in the characters hand and snap your cursor to the selection. Then create a “child of” constraint on the object and make it the child of the bone. The object might translate off in some weird way, just snap the selection back to the cursor. Now you will be able to animate the influence of the parent-child relationship. keyframe the influence from 0 to 1 over the course of 1 frame to pick it up and vice-versa to put it down. Keep in mind that when you put it down, the object will return to its original location before it became the child of the bone. To fix that, use the same method mentioned above by snapping the cursor to the object before you turn off the influence of the constraint. Then after you keyframed the influence off, snap selection to cursor (be sure to keyframe the location of the object 1 frame before it is put down, then snap to cursor and keyframe it again).

Another solution to your problem would be to render out the frames where he is holding the object, then delete the parent and seperately render out the frames where he isn’t holding it.

You just need to use a Child-of constraint, and animate it’s influence over time.

thanks! it realy worked!

and i thought it would be just like normal parent…

thanks again!