How to approach FPS hands animating process (several tries)

YoungWolf

Hello,

I'm trying to animate my FPS hands model for a pistol I made. I rigged both of them and for the hands I have IK setup from shoulder to arms, and IK for each finger as well as some controls.

I imported the gun rig into the scene and thought of two ways animating this:

#1: I linked both hand controllers to the root bone of the gun, and started animating. Got very pleasant results and I was happy, but then I realised that I only did keyframes for the pistol rig, the hands didn't have any keys in the timeline.

#2: I decided to redo that, so I linked the pistol root bone and the left hand to the right hand controller. Then I started animating and started getting keyframes on the hands rig. But apparantly for some reason I don't know why, Everything starts to flicker. Hand's get broken, dissapearing when playing animation etc. Very broken.

I can't think of a third way animating this. Can somebody help me?

musashidan

Go with no 1 but, set keys on the entire rig at each pose. Even animating a full body rig I will always keyframe every single controller. It's a clean way to animate and keeps your keys organised and makes offsetting keys at the polish stage easier too.

linking rigs back on themselves can create looping dependencies and break things.

YoungWolf

How exactly do I do that? I'm linking the hand controllers to the root bone of the gun. Click on Auto Key and start animating. But the hands rig doesn't record any key frames.

Is there something I'm missing?

musashidan

Select all controllers and set key. It's right beside the autokey button. Also, it's better to setup controllers on your rig so you're not directly animating bones.