Rigging hands to hold a weapons?
polycounter lvl 7
Hello, polycount!
I'm trying to learn some more rigging techniques and was wondering how to rig a person holding a two-handed weapon. I don't mean rig a person in general, but what kind of a setup to use on the hands for a nice-to-use and robust two-handed wielding.
For rifles, I imagine IK on the arms to follow the gun should be enough for most needs. What about two-handed swords? If you use IK on the arms, how do you achieve nice arc movement on the sword swing?
With a halberd it gets interesting, because the wielder can use it as a spear to thrust or as an axe to swing. With thrusting you'd generally want to have a straight path, by using IK and arms following the weapon. With a swing you'd want to have an arc, meaning FK on one arm leading the weapon and IK on the other to follow. In both cases the weapon is held with two hands. The hands should ideally always grip the weapon properly.
Anyone tackled something like this before? What are general techniques when dealing with hand-to-weapon rigging?
I'm trying to learn some more rigging techniques and was wondering how to rig a person holding a two-handed weapon. I don't mean rig a person in general, but what kind of a setup to use on the hands for a nice-to-use and robust two-handed wielding.
For rifles, I imagine IK on the arms to follow the gun should be enough for most needs. What about two-handed swords? If you use IK on the arms, how do you achieve nice arc movement on the sword swing?
With a halberd it gets interesting, because the wielder can use it as a spear to thrust or as an axe to swing. With thrusting you'd generally want to have a straight path, by using IK and arms following the weapon. With a swing you'd want to have an arc, meaning FK on one arm leading the weapon and IK on the other to follow. In both cases the weapon is held with two hands. The hands should ideally always grip the weapon properly.
Anyone tackled something like this before? What are general techniques when dealing with hand-to-weapon rigging?
Replies
You don't have to make it that fancy though. The beauty of custom rigs is that you can have one rig in the slash attack file, and another rig in the strike file. You pretty much covered each method I would use, so I'm not sure what ever information you are digging around for. Is this for an FPS weapon? Or for a full character?
Allowing for the dominate hand to key the animation in FK or IK at any given time
I did some extra research, checking the character rigs from Sintel open movie. The spear weapon rig is interesting. It is rigged to a bone, with an extra bone acting as a movable rotation pivot and an extra bone for sliding the spear along it's length. I'm thinking of emailing one of the animators and see if he can explain how this is used effectively in practice.