Hi all, new to ue5 and animation here. May I ask for some guidance how to animate a character pulling a wrench?
I’m using MetaHuman with a socket added to its left hand. The wrench is a SM under an empty Actor. The Actor is then attached to the hand’s socket while keeping the wrench’s pivot at its head in order to be able to rotate properly in sequencer. However, from here on I couldn’t figure out how to make the hand glued to the handle and move accordingly…
Is there anyway to make the hand follow the handle? Or is there another way to do it?
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If you use the Control Rig you could parent the hand controller to the head of the wrench, so that whenever the wrench is rotating, the hands will follow, and you can enable/disable this directly inside Sequencer.
Looking at the picture I can see that you’re not using the Control Rig, so the alternative would be to use an AnimBP where you have a TwoBoneIK node and a TransformBone node:
The TwoBoneIK will use as input the position of the socket on the wrench handle, so that it will follow, and you can create a “link” between the current rotation of the handle so that the hand will rotate accordingly, like now your hands are at around 30° compared to the handle current rotation, when the handle will be pushed down, I expect the hands rotation to be at 90° compared to the handle rotation.
I also suggest you to have a blend node in the AnimBP ( assuing this is a kind of in-game mechanic ), where you can blend the current animation that is being played ( like idle ) with the TwoBoneIK+TransformBone node setup, so that you can blend them together in realtime.
If you use the Control Rig you could parent the hand controller to the head of the wrench, so that whenever the wrench is rotating, the hands will follow, and you can enable/disable this directly inside Sequencer.
That’s it! Thank you for your help!
Yes I am using Control Rig and I managed to make things more complicated by having the wrench SM inside another empty Actor to allow me a second pivot for attachment. I thought it would allow me 2 points control but I was wrong.
In sequencer I detached the wrench at certain frame, keyed the wrench’s last absolute position for it to stays. Then used Control Rig Snapper to parent hand ik ctrl to the wrench and snap animation. Works like magic
However, I’m still having issue with the wrench’s rotation when it detaches. Both absolute and relative rotation is 0 when it was attached to the hand socket… And setting the attachment properties “When finished” to keep state makes everything go nuts…
