Maya Constraint Help Please

#1

I am working on an animation in which my character is walking with a cane.

I thought I had my constraints set up in a way that was going to work but it hasn’t turned out that way.

In my scene the character starts out holding the cane by the bend and then tosses the cane up and catches it down below on the straight section.

I am hoping to have the hand adjustable in relation to the cane while still being driven by it.

And then I want to be able to switch the constraint to the lower position on the cane.

The issue I seem to be running into is switching between the two grip locations.

If anyone could let me know how you would go about setting this up or any pointers you might have that would be awesome.

Thanks

#2

You can try to animate cane while having a 2 loactors placed in 2 grip positions and parented to cane.
Then You can constrain hand to this locators and switch weights.

You can also try constraining with maintain offset on, so You can key offset values to achieve griping in different parts.

#3

Hey.

I would make a locator, and put the locator in a group. Then either parent the cane to the locator, or parent constrain the cane to the locator, which ever works best for your setup.

Parent constrain the group to the hand, and then animate the locator to change the ‘grip positions’. Ideally, if the character is tossing the cane up into the air, you might also want to make a setup to turn the constraint off so that you can jsut animate the locator freely and turn it back on when the chracter next grabs the cane.

#4

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