First, apologies if these questions have been asked before. I'm not really sure how to describe them, or if there are any technical terms and so I don't know what to search for in order to check if they have been... if that makes sense.
So recently I've been starting to teach myself to animate with Maya, and there's a few things I don't know how to do (which I assume are possible) and are really slowing me down.
I'm using what I think is a fairly cool starting rig (this one here: https://www.creativecrash.com/maya/do...c/max-for-maya). Like a lot of other rigs I have seen, the arms are controlled with FK (adjusting each joint from center / root out is FK, right?).
So, first question is with a rig like the above, or others with FK arms or limbs in general, how can I attach (bind, fix?) a prop to say, both hands? For example, to animate picking up a box with both arms.
I've come across the parent constraint for linking a prop to a single limb but that doesn't work well for situations that require both to be consistently fixed to the prop. If it helps, all I've done with props so far is create / import an item and try to have the rig interact with it, little to no additional setup other than parent constraint mentioned above.
At the moment, I just end up moving the joints along with the prop and trying to match them up which is pretty awkward and I'm guessing is the wrong way to do it.
Next question is kind of a variation of the above. With the rig above and others the legs seem to use IK, which is handy as the feet move independent of the body. Is there a way to do this with FK joints, such as arms? Or, perhaps fix them in a position or to an object, rather than move them independently as that's obviously not the intention with FK.
Example - I want to animate a character climbing a ladder. The feet (if IK) would be easy to keep in the right place as once positioned they don't move when the rest of the body is moved. However, at least with the above rig, the hands will move as the body does, meaning like above I end up trying to move the arms to compensate and it just doesn't really work.
Another example would be climbing onto something, a wall maybe, the rig would have the arms stretched up but would want to keep the hands in a fixed position as the body moves up. At the moment, if I move the body up the arms go with it, etc.
Hope the above all makes sense and apologies for the masses of text, too.
Thanks in advance for any help you can offer, it's much appreciated!
Cheers.
