For my homework I need to make a simple robotic hand that is static on it’s “shoulder” and standing still on some surface (desk, floor etc.) and with a right movement of (two) fingers wrist, elbow and shoulder it should take some ball from one place and move it to another place. I made parenting on the hand and everything is working great except when it needs to take that ball. Than the hard part starts.
When I’m entering keyframes and moving the hand I also need to do for the ball and I’m hoping there’s a easiest way. I tried connecting ball to the wrist with parent option and it works until I need to “detach” the ball from the hand and let it slide on the surface. When I do that she just come to the first position in the beginning.
Does anyone have any idea how to solve this problem? :eyebrowlift:
With a copy location/ copy rotation constraint combo, or a parent constraint.
If you parent using constraints, you can animate the intensity.
Intensity 0 keyed until 1 frame before pickup.
On pickup key the intensity to 1 and its parented.
I’m not sure if I’m doing it right :o
I selected the ball and selected Add Constraint–>Child of and than I typed the object wrist because it should move according to that. I understood what you mean how to solve this problem but I can’t find that intensity that you mentioned. Did you mean on Influence maybe? I tried to move it from scale 0 (one frame before I want the hand to pick the ball) to scale 1 (the first next frame) and inserting keyframes but it doesn’t help. As I can see it’s always on the last scale that I choose (that would be scale 1). Even frames before have influence 1.
Do you know whats causing this problem?
Thanks a lot for your help
YesYes!
Sorry for my wrong terminology… I am quite confused today =)
quick walkthrough, you did most right already.
Select parent, then shiftselect child.
With child active press ctrl+alt+c and choose child of
press f7 to bring up the object view.
split windows somewhere and show the IPO too.
now in the constraints tab you see the child of constraint with the influence slider =)
Next to it is a show and a key button.
turn the slider to 0.0
go to frame 1 (ctrl+left) arrow and press “key”
If you press “show” it shows the ipo curve in the ipo editor.
Now you got a ipo curve for the influence at 0.0
now go one frame before the pickup, press key again.
go to the next frame where the pickup happens, turn slider to 1.0 and press key again.
Sorry for being pain in the a$$ but I stumbled on another problem. In my animation I do 3 times grabbing the object and letting it go. When I make my first grabbing-letting go combo it’s all fine until I do the next one. When I make my other picking and letting go of the object that combination is great but it messed up my first combination. In my first combination my object would just “escape” from the hand in the frame when I increase influence. It’s the same for the third combination too. If I do correctly the third part my first two combinations would go bad, the objects would “escape” from their hands.
I tried almost every possible combination with LocRot keyframes and I don’t know what’s the reason of this problem.
Can you help me one more time?
I was experimenting with this yesterday and didn’t get around to commenting on it. I have a character pic up a cube, move it, and drop it in a new position. So I tried to get my character to pick up the cube a second time and it appears to me the offset of the child of constraint is causing problems.
To me, the simplest solution would be to break the animation up into 3 scenes, one for each time the arm is to move the object. This solution could cause other problems depending upon the scene. The points where you split the scene up at is crucial, because by default, blender uses bezier curves for interpolation. It would be best to split the scenes at a point where no movement occurs. If you split the scene in a spot where movement is taking place, you would be basically splitting up the bezier curve, which could result in a ‘hiccup’ in the animation when spliced together, I would think. Switching interpolation from bezier to linear would be another way of avoiding ‘hiccups’ if you have to split the scene at a point where movement takes place.
That could be a good idea but I already found a solution for this problem. I don’t know is it “according the rules” or not but here it goes: I just made three constraints with the same parent-child relationship
Each constraint is turned on and off just once and than when I need new one I create a new constraint.
It was a long shot but it works! Maybe it has some limitations how many same constraints you can create but it works excellent with three of them.
I wonder if I gave anybody a good idea with other constraints in the future
Thanks a lot for your help guys, and randy I’ll try your method when I catch some free time.
Actually, as long as the constraints don’t conflict, your method would be the best. I’ll have to remember this!! It would avoid any problems I mentioned about the interpolation of curves. So yea, great idea!!!
I have a slightly different problem here , I have a character and I want him to pick up an object with both hands and hold it for a short walk…
I tried to parent the object to 1 hand but the result was unnatural because the other hand was moving independent from the object…
