How to attach a two handed shovel to both hands in an animation?

Development Character & Animation
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Hi there. I just want to dig a hole but it seems very difficult with Unreal.

Take a look at my attempt here:

I’ve tried constraints in 5.1, but those don’t seem to work on sockets of static meshes, rather it just works on the whole static mesh at once. So if you have two constraints on the shovel attached to two hands, the shovel goes all over the place.

Any ideas on how I can easily lock one end of the shovel to the left hand, and the other end of the shovel to the right hand?

Thanks a lot!

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Hi @0scar_0

■■■■ you nearly there, have a look at this, i watched it some time ago so it may or may not help, but I’m sure there are some settings in there about the rigidity of joined physics constraint’s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bdd3EaVWx2g&t=270s

Hope it helps!

Stewart

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Thanks a lot, @High500!! I will take a look at that video and come back here and share what I learned.

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Hi all. I have some more information to report for this topic. I reached out to Fredrik Nilsson, Lead Technical Product Manager at Epic Games (Twitter: @FredNilsson) because I saw his awesome video on Animating in Unreal Engine 5.1.

I asked him if this problem of attaching the shovel to the skeletal mesh animation sequence was possible with constraints, and he said:

Yeah you should be able to do this with constraints or attach tracks:

Depending on how you want to lead the action. You have a few choices.

Both hands in IK. Constrained to the shovel, Animate shovel to drive the arms.

Or
One arm in FK with shovel constrained to the hand. Other hand in IK constrained to Shovel

Sometimes you have to adjust the evaluation order of the constraints so the system knows what to evaluate first. You can click on the Constraints Manager in Outliner and see all constraints listed in Constraints view and use those little arrows to move constraint evaluation up/m or down the list…

You might want to also play with aim/look at constraints for animating it…

Have you seen any of Richard Licos stuff?

Richard Lico Animation Workflow Siggraph 2018 on Vimeo

Go to around 2:15 to see how he uses aims on props…

Hope this is helpful!!!

And on the topic of other ways of using constraints, like the idea of adding a constraint to a specific location on a static mesh he mentioned:

You can add a cube. Place it at the end of the sword or wherever you want it and then bake out the results. Then you can now reverse the constraint to have the sword look at that cube… so now you’ve converted your rotation animation to a look at… Hope that makes sense…
You would place the cube and parent constrain it…
Then bake the results…
Then use that baked result to become what you’re aiming at…

Thanks so much, Fredrik!! Hopefully his comments help you as much as they helped me.

I will need to work on these things to really understand what the hell I am doing… haha.

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