I’ve only been using Blender for about 3 days. I’ve been running through youtube tutorials and figuring out the interface. The only other 3D work I’ve done has been in the trail version of 2011 Maya Autodesk.
My question is: What’s the best way to put, and keep, an item in a models hand?
The long term gain I’m looking for is being able to swap out those items in a game engine. Items being weapons of course.
Right now, I have a low-poly character model with all the armatures bound to him. I then created a weapon model to test how I could get it to work. But I’m having no luck. The object isn’t a part of the character model and when I join them, the armatures “un-bind” from the mesh, which is probably a good thing, I don’t know.
If you could give me some links to a tutorial on how all this works that would be great. I normally search far and wide on forums for my problem… but I just don’t know what terms to search for.
This has been answered often, but it is faster for me to re-explain, than dig up the old answers.
For Blender animation:
Create an empty as anchor point at the body
Parent the empty to the e.g. handbone.
Create another empty as anchor point for the prop.
Parent the prop to the empty.
Now creat a copy location and copy rotation so the empty.prop ends up at the empty.hand.
Those constraints now got influence sliders. If the influence is 1 the location/rotation is copied and follows the arm.
If the influence is 0 the empty with the prop stays where is. So you basically animate with the influence at 1 and from one frame to the next you key it to 0.
Just be aware that you got to key the location as well. If you key a location for the empty.prop and have the influence 1 it will follow the empty.arm. However once you key it to 0 it will hop back to the last keyed location.
And if you wonder why I use empties and not the arm bone and prop directly.
You can easily change the prop by parenting something else to the emtpy.prop without affecting the keyed animation.
You can also use a copy location for the empty.arm and for instance key it one time to the handbone, one time to the backbone and one time to the hipbone and mount the weapon on your hip or your back that way.
For usage in a game engine it is usally done with dummy bones.
It is basically the same like the above, you simply use a dummybone for the mount points where usually the bones base is the point.
Same goes for the weapon, where you need a skeleton for most animation libraries (like CAL3D) anyways, so also the weapon needs a bone.
The rest is the responsibility of the coder. Basically he codes 2 methods that do exactly what the constraints for copy location/copy rotation do and usually you got a set naming convention for the skeleton parts so the coder knows his way around.