From the course: 3D Animation and Rigging

Picking up objects - Maya Tutorial

From the course: 3D Animation and Rigging

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Picking up objects

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- [George] Hi, I'm George Maestri. Today we're going to be doing some pickups. We're actually going to have a character pick up an object. Now this is a very simple task that a lot of animators need to do. And so I'm going to show you two simple techniques for basically placing an object in the hand and having the character carry that object. And in this case, we're going to have him pick up this glass. So as I scrape through you see he places his hands on the glass and he lifts, but, oh, the class didn't go with it. So we can fix that using a couple of different techniques. So the first technique I'm going to use is probably the one I would recommend to use in most situations. And that is to use a constraint, in this case, a parent constraint. So all we have to do is basically go to the point where he touches the glass which in this case is around frame eight. And then we need to constrain that glass to somewhere on his hand. Now it's going to depend upon how you animate the hand here. So I'm actually going to hop into a perspective view here. So going to panels perspective. And you can see here that I've got this control here which is basically just for the fingers. And so that pretty much moves with the hand. Now the fingers are going to animate. We could do the wrist, but if you switch between IK and FK, that may be a problem. So for this particular character let's use this fingers control here. So all we have to do is basically just scroll to the frame where he grabs the cup and then select the part of the character we're going to constrain it to. In this case, the fingers. And then shift select the cup. And then we do a constrain parent constraint. We want to make sure we have maintain offset on and weight is at one. Click add. And now if I select this cup you'll see that I have this parent constraint. Right now it's set to one. And what that means is that when this character picks it up, it goes with it. But it's still constrained in the frames before frame eight. So we did this at frame eight, so that's what it's registered to, but as we go backwards, obviously we don't want that. So what we need to do is animate that constraint off. So all I have to do is select this weight object here. It's called control fingers LW-0 and that stands for weight. And let's go ahead and just hit the S key to set a key. So at eight, it's going to be on. At seven, It's going to be off. So we'll just type in zero. So now it's off, it's on and there it goes. Okay. That's great. So that's method one. So all you have to do is use a parent constraint and then turn the constraint on or off, depending upon where you want the character to carry the object. So let's go into the outliner and I'm going to go ahead to the cup here and select that parent constraint. Let's go back to frame eight here and just delete that parent constraint. Now the second method is a little bit more of a slight of hand and what we're actually going to do is have two cups, and what is going to appear and the other one's going to disappear. And we can do that using visibility. So I'm going to go ahead and select this cup and then just hit Ctrl+D to duplicate it. So the second cup, I want a parent to that same joint. So I'm going to go ahead and select the cup and then select fingers control hit the letter P and that parents that cup to the hands. So now we have one cup that follows the hand and another one that's just always on the table. While we can swap between them by just doing visibility. So here on frame eight, I'm going to select the cup in his hand and let's go ahead and turn visibility off and set a key. So now he goes there and then at frame nine, we're going to turn it on. Go ahead and do that. So now he lifts that up and there we go, but we still have one more cup to deal with. So this cup here is going to be on at eight. So go ahead, click visibility, keep that on. That's the one that's on the table. And then it turns off as soon as he lifts it at nine. So let's go ahead and hit zero. So now you can see I have the one on the table selected and then at frame nine, it switches to the other one. And if I want to, I can select the other one and you can see how it switches when he picks it up. Okay, so there we go. Two ways to have a character pick up an object. The first one is use a parent constraint and animate that constraint from zero to one when the character picks up the object. The second method is to simply animate the visibility between two objects, one, which is constrained to the character's hand, the other one, which is stationary. So hopefully this gives you some good ideas as to how to animate your character picking stuff up.

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