Character Animation: The Fun Part - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 323

to be adjusted so that it looks like the
character is actually holding on. This
brings up one of the necessary deficien-
cies of our rig. If we had really wanted
to be accurate, we would have put IK
controllers at the ends of the fingers too,
as they are technically bearing some of
the weight of the hand when they press
against the chair back. Such a construc-
tion would have locked the hand per-
fectly in place. Why did I call this a
“necessary” deficiency? Well, it would
just be too complicated to execute, espe-
cially in a supposed beginner's topic.
And if the only problem that not having
it causes is that we have to add a few
keys to fix hand orientation, I'd say it's
a worthy omission.

Figure 11.38 What happens when you constrain the cube directly to the
hand. The pain!

Throwing the Cube
In order to have our character carry and eventually throw the cube, we have to go the whole way back
to frame 1. The cube needs to become a temporary part of the rig itself. The easiest way to do this is to
give the cube both a Copy Location and Copy Rotation constraint and bind it to the hand. Of course,
we can't bind it to the hand itself because
the constraints would cause the cube to
appear in the middle of the hand, like Figure
11.38 . The solution, shown in Figure 11.39 ,
is to go back into Edit mode on the arma-
ture and duplicate the hand bone, moving
it to float above the palm. Make this new
bone the disconnected child of the hand
bone so that it always moves with the hand.

The result is that when the cube is con-
strained to this new bone, the bone becomes
a full controller for the cube. You can
use it to translate and rotate the cube into a
nice location among the fingers of the hand.
The cube, positioned by the new bone,
and

its two constraints are shown in

Figure 11.40 .

Figure 11.39 Adding a new bone is the solution.