CGTalk - CS - two handed weapons

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drunkirishmic

06-20-2003, 05:07 AM

im participating in the cg challenge for this month and i hav to animate 2 characters each with a two handed weapon. the only way i hav found to animate it, is to link the weapoin to one hand, then animate the second hand on ones. and needless to say, this is becoming very time consuming. is their a better way?

i thought in cs4 there was gonna be a prop thing, but havent been able to get this to work, at all. is their some sort of constraint i can use to make the other hand follow the weapon?

tw, max 5.1 and cs 4.1

thanks

phil

06-20-2003, 09:15 AM

There's a couple of possibilities i can think of.

If you link the weapon to one hand and make it look at the other (with a look at constraint). This is ok for a spear or something - the top hand will slide up and down the spear while the bottom hand stays put.

or.

Make the weapon control the hands by putting sliding keys on both hands and choosing the gun as their world space (not the right terminology, i haven't got max or cs4 infront of me). Do this in the ik settings in cs4. Now the hands should follow the gun, so you animate the gun and not the hands. This can cause problems with the elbows going through the chest but if you're careful it can work quite well.

I'm sure there must be other ways.

cheers,
phil

gaggle

06-20-2003, 09:20 AM

Indeed there is, it was possible in the old CS as well no less.

Check out the Key Info rollout, hit the IK .. rollout..thingie. Now select the hand that is to simply follow another object, set a "Planted Key", then hit the little arrow right below the radiobutton labeled "Object", then select your weapon. Hit OK for the dialogbox that appears.
Then hit the "Object" radiobutton, and slide IK Blend up to 1.0.

Tadaa, move the weapon, and the hand moves with it.

I suggest trying it out on a fresh scene first, foolin' around with this crashed MAX a few times when I tried to have only one hand following an object, and the object then linked to the hand by a link-controller.
Both hands can apparently be IK Blended to follow the object just fine though.

I've attached the wittle testscene I messed around with.

drunkirishmic

06-21-2003, 07:32 AM

thanks a lot guys, i will try them out. the second sounds good because of the above mentioned elbow problem. but i might try the first one because one of the characters has a spear.

thanks again

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