Problem with Rigging : How to make a character mantain a sword grip?

Kyle_butler

I'm stuck with the following problem: I'm trying to make a sword fight sequence in maya. I want the character to mantain both hands at the sword.

I'm using ZV Parent Master in Maya to constrain the sword handle to the right hand. Everything works fine.



However, I can't seem to find a way to constrain the left hand to the sword... Any suggestions to make that grip work?
(here is a failed attempt of parent constraing the left hand to the handle).

monster

You need to create IK for the left arm, and constrain the locator instead of the joints.

Kyle_butler

Thanks for your answer, monster.
About the locator: if I parent constrain it to the hand joint, so that it will follow the arm movement, and then parent constrain sword to the locator, won't I get a cycle error?

54Strat

I think monster meant constrain the locator (which the Left Arm IK is contrained to) to the sword as you're using the right hand to control everything. Then I'd orient constrain the Left Hand to the Sword maintaining offsets, then add a pole vector to give a bit more control over the left arm.

Space switching may be a better way to do this, but it's a bit more involved to rig and setup.

Kyle_butler

Thanks, 54Strat! It looks much better now!
It will take some tweak of the mocap data in order to avoid the sword to penatrate into the hand mesh, but this did the trick!

I'll look into Space switching for a future project. I'm not working in a custom rig right now, just the default Humanik skeleton.

Thanks a lot, guys!