I forget his name but he does those two hour long animation challenges that only those that are twisted and totally addicted to motion design would ever sit all the way throught. I watched the 'badda**' one all the way throught twice now. Awesome german guy said doing a powerlift would be very tough cuz you gotta make the barbell look like it's heavy and that's hard.
No, awesome German dude. What's hard is getting the barbell to stay in the correct position. I'm using motionbuilder and I thought I'd be geeking out on intense agony pain expressions and tension building secondary body motion. But nooooo....
This isn't like giving a character a sword. I tried constraining the barbell to both hands and oh wow, motionbuilder did not like that. I tried muscling through it with lots of keyframes. Nope. And motionbuilder won't let me constrain the hands to the barbell for some reason.
I constrained the bar to one hand and with fine tuning the hand position I could get it in the right place for story and extreme poses. But barbells have to be perfectly placed. You look at the grip first thing. It can't clip. It can't wobble. My figure is lifting so much weight the bar is going to bend. Oh and the bar bending is another issue. But that's for another forum.
The problem is the interpolation. I'm messing with the F curves but at this point it seems like the constraint is getting in the way. Anyone every have to animate someone on a trapeze or something where both hands have to be in the exact stupid same position during complex motions like the clean and jerk where the arms basically have to do a preacher curl?
Am I going to have to do an extension. Rig the barbell? Can you make an extension that connects to two parts of the body?
I think there's a forum diety. I just post the issue and then I figure out the solution. You can constrain the FK effector. You can't constrain IK as a child evidently, but FK constrains real nice. Now I'm going to drink some ice tea, and I won't lie, act a little smug. Rarely does animation make me feel smart so I'm going to enjoy this rare moment.
In hindsight it doesn't entirely make sense. How does a constraining parent object differ from a translation device to IK? IK effectors should constrain better than FK. But I'm a noob so what the heck do I know?