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mduclon
03-07-2005, 04:51 PM
I have an animation I'm building. A person playing a musical instrument. The persons hands will move up and down a neck of the instrument, a Chapman stick, a guitar like instrument and the fingers will move to the notes played in a piece. My question is this. What's the best way to set up the fingers for something like this. Should I set up IK in each finger and then stop the ik at the hand and use goals at the tips of each finger. Then move the hand to the position and manipulate the goals for each finger to the notes played? Or is there a better way someone can suggest?
Any help greatly appreciated.
ljilekor
03-07-2005, 05:19 PM
Don't look too far. Examine your needs. We need a hand that can slide along an instruments' arm and fingers that play notes.

Parent your Wrist_IK_Goal to a Slide_Null that is at his turn parented to the arm of the instrument. By animating the Slide_Null on 1 axis (eg Xaxis) you can move your hand along the arm of the instrument.
Make sure the wrist is aligned to the wrist_ik_goal. This way you only need to animate one controler to orient the hand.
Group your Wrist_Ik_Goal and fingers (for easy keyframing).
Make a neutral pose.
Make all chord poses u need and assign the hand poses to a slider (MotionBlend(er) / CycleBranch/...).

Now you can animate the hands' position on the arm by using the slide_null (on 1 axis).
Animate the fingers by blending poses using the chord sliders. You may have to blend (x %) to the neutral pose between two chords to avoid strange twists in the fingers.

This will work quite well
If you really need a slow and good CU of the fingers pressing the snares, it may not be enough. But it's a quite accurate and fast technique if you have to animate a whole song.

Cheers
mduclon
03-07-2005, 05:33 PM
Thanks, these are good suggestions. I like the idea of animating a slide up and down the neck, On a stick both hands play the notes on the neck, it's a touch instrument. The neck will move with the body of the person so I have to make sure the hand stays pretty much the same distance from the neck as it moves. I'm not sure on that one. I will try the chords settings. I can really call it pose settings. The left had is more consitant playing a base part throughout the song so that should be easy, and the lead plays lead, mostly 3 fingers strinking the strings so I think I can just make a few poses with one finger down and 2 slightly up for the right hand and then use those for the poses or like you said chords.

thanks again
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03-07-2005, 05:33 PM
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