Picking up objects?

[meester smeeth]

Hello there, Does anybody know a good way to pick up an object with a hand or machine?  I was thinking constraints at first and then animating the weight but that didnt actually change the power of the controlling object, maybe I'm missing a setting somewhere....

 

I did an animation recently of a crane lifting steel around a site and actually had new scenes set up for every time something was picked up or put down.  Afterwards I thought, there has got to be a better way to do this! :)

 

A bit like animating the parent power would be perfect I think?

 

Al

[S. Houtzager]

I have done that sort of thing with just visibility.  I have 2 copies of the same object.  When it is on the ground the first one is visible.  When it is picked up the second one is visible. That way the 2nd one can be parented to the crane.

[RichardJoly]

Now, that is smart...!

[fantomaz]

Hey, i did it the same way like Steve, you can see it here:

 

http://www.cobra-gestaltung.de/Webvideo/SiCon_Ton_512x288_dt.mp4

 

Look at the first 2 minutes, there are several parent/child „objectsâ€,

worked perfect  :shy:

 

Alex

[meester smeeth]

Thanks for the ideas fellas, animating visibilty is sort of one step better than what I did last time. 

 

Fantomaz, thanks for the video, that makes sense how you did that.  The crane animation I did actually had to put a structure together of around 50 steel pieces and using 2 cranes at once, you can imagine how many crane to peices of steel set ups it needed, even with your technique, it would still need all this set up.

 

I was really hoping constraints would work somehow, I say this while not knowing fully how they work, I use 'look at' a lot and that works well.  I haven't found any use for the others and I bet they could be useful.

 

I was looking around at tutorials for other software, just to see how they go about this sort of thing and blender had a good way of doing it that was similar to a constraint and the strength was animated to full when needed etc.  It would be really good if we could do this!  I'll try to mess around with the constraints and see how it goes........

[fantomaz]

Hm, what about magnets and Bullet? I didn't do anything with magnets,

only testing Vehicle with Bullet, but magnets could be the answer to your prob,

could they? Had anyone did some tests with magnets?

 

Alex

[Tomas Egger]

Ola,

 

I just did this simple Constrain project, worked fine, please, take a look.

 

Edit: This is a simple Position Constrain, transferring a Cube from a Bone end to another, animated.

 

Thanks

 

Tom

 

Constrain.zip

[S. Houtzager]

Nice Trick Tomas.  I see how the cube is part of the bone nearest to it.  How is the cube attached to the joint end?

[Tomas Egger]

Ola Steven!

The cube is position constrained on both bones end, click in the cube and then in the constrain window, I only animated the power of each position constrain, from 1.0 to 0.0 in one bone and the second from 0.0 to 1.0

Simple trick!

Thanks

Tom

[meester smeeth]

Thanks Tomas! That is exactly what is needed! Perfect and simple!  And actually much easier to set up than the Blender example I saw and thought was a nice function. 

 

Good man!

[Tomas Egger]

Ola,

 

EIAS have lots of easy tricks, need only to practice :)

 

Thanks

 

Tom