Recently Digital Tutors posted a tutorial for characters interacting with objects in Maya. For the longest time I have used (and still use) the technique that my teacher showed me back in school –>here<– . After watching the opening for the new digital tutor video, what other ways can you set up a character to grab a object? Someone told me with a parent constraint but i tested it out a second ago and just couldn’t get it. Also, would you be so kind to explain these to me or send me a link to a site that does. Not to be cheep, cause i love digital tutor and with there help i know how to rig a character from scratch, but i don’t exactly feel like paying 45.00 for a 4 video lesson on how to do it. If i have to ok, but there are more sources right?
Character & Object Interactions
Hi,
Happy New Year!
You could replace the Set Driven Keys with utilities from the Hypershade. You could use the Blend Colors, Multiply/Divide, plusMinusAverage nodes. You could also include the condition utility. Using this method you could apply logic and these are faster than Set Driven Keys. If a control has been set using utilities then it will be easy to replicate the process and convert them into scripts/plugins. This is useful in production. Give it a shot. Play around with them 
This is the other way that I have used to put in controls for grasping and also IK/FK switching too. Sean Nolan has a tutorial for IK/FK switching. That’s where I got to know this method.
http://www.creativecrash.com/tutorials/seamless-ikfk-arm-setup
Have a great year
Hi,
I’ve just made a tutorial describing how the Set Driven Keys can be skipped. I’ve used a Hypershade utility called Blend Colors.
Maya Hypershade utilities for Rigging 1
Let me know if you have any doubts.
Thanks for posting guys. you can close this one down though. thanks to yalls help and a nice Maya book i picked up called “How to cheat in Maya 2010” Ive figured out several solutions to my problem and many different ways of doing it that work just great :). thanks again for all the help guys, yall rock.
Its amazing, for someone like me. I was surprised it had so much information. It focuses only on animation. Animation is something I already have extensive knowledge about, but the only things I really needed help with was understanding the shortcuts and more complicated parts in maya. Boy did it deliver. It does a great job helping me learn new ways to block out my scenes, make rather unique parent constraints and that was just after 2 days of flipping through. The book is great for someone new to Maya animation and even teaches vets like us the simple lil things that we may have missed or taken for granet along the way. It comes with a rather nice custom rig and several work files that go with each chapter your reading. Its a must buy if your a Maya animator. If you do texturing, fx, modeling, and etc you would do best with another book. I’ll give it a 9.1 out of 10. I would have given it a 10, but it would have needed to cover the animation fundamentals more by like about maybe 60, 100 pages. But then again, thats what Richard Williams “Animators Survival Kit” is for. Now that’s a perfect “10” animators book.
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