Hey there. I am working on an animation in witch my character is holding a sword in his hand while running.
I have both the character and the sword models separately, and I just finished creating the run animation on the character.
But now I am having trouble making the sword stay in the hand of the charter.I tried to parent the sword to the character hand model but it didn’t work. (I also tried vertex parenting and it worked, but the rotation is quite weird)
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Generally since I come from Cinema4D, if I wanted to achieve that effect there I would simply make the sword model a child of the hand object, then align the sword properly for one frame and the rest would be working)
Do you have a separate armature for the sword, please say no! What you should do is make another bone for the sword, that is parented to the hand bone but not connected to it. This sword bone should inherit rotation from the hand bone, scale is immaterial unless you intend scaling the hand!. You can then move the hand bone and the sword will move with it. You can also move the sword independently of the hand, e.g. put it out of sight, (use Transform Locations) for when you don’t want to see it in the camera, then put it next to the hand bone (set Transform to same as hand) and it will move with it. Parent the sword to its bone with empty groups then assign all vertices in edit mode to the sword vertex group. Hope this is all makes sense! :spin::spin:
You can also keyframe the influence of the constraint so you could for example hand the sword from one hand to the other by changing the appropriate influence for each hand
I have just done an experiment, If you apply a Child Of constraint to each hand and to a bone left on the floor or elsewhere as you animate the character, you can switch the sword, or whatever, to either hand as Richard has done, or to the resting place, on the flow for example. I tried this and it works (Just modded Richard’s rig to add another bone and another Child Of constraint and key framed the constraint value.) There seems to be no end to the places you can “magic” the sword to if you mix the constraint influences over a period of time.
