MHX Rig - how do you constrain one ik hand to another?

DrGonzo62

I can't for the life of me figure out how to constrain one ik hand to another character's ik hand.
What would take me 5 seconds to do in Motionbuilder, I can't figure out in Blender.

The closest to this I got is to use a child constraint on both ik handles to an intermediary object and then moving said object.
I tried adding a child constraint on one ik handle, and target the other figures handle. In Motionbuilder, I tell the constraint to snap both objects in place (or not).
But how do you do that with the MHX rig? When I apply the child constraint's target, the source ik handle moves pretty far away

Can Rigify snap a child constraint in place? Or are there better constraints for this in Blender?
Strudel search did not render immediate results.

Thanks!

Padone

Yes what you did is pretty much how it is done in blender, use a empty reference for the child-of constraint. Then you use the influence for animation, so you need to plan from the start how many children you need. Note that this is dynamic parenting.

DrGonzo62

Got it!
Thanks for the clarification, Padone. Much appreciated.

Update: After playing around with this some more, I've managed to Parent/Child the hand ik handles directly to each other after all.
Clicking Set inverse in the constraint fixed the transform issue. Such an odd default behavior.

After dipping my toes into Blender for a few weeks now, I'm starting to get the impression that some of its functionality was written by someone who was tasked to create said functionality, and not by someone who's actually using it this way on a regular basis.
Technically, all the features are more or less there, but the implementation is sometimes not very intuitive.
I suppose that this is the reason why some users consider moving from DAZ to Blender having a pretty steep learning curve.
And now I can see why. But I still think that it's worth the struggle.

 

Padone

Personally I don't advise to use "set inverse", as that can't be animated. Unless your parenting is static for the entire scene. In general it is better to ues empties as reference for the child-of constraint, then the influence to parent to the desired empty. Also I definitely agree that most blender features are overcomplicated and not too much user friendly, we have to learn how to deal with the beast, luckily there's plenty of documentation and tutorials available.

DrGonzo62

Thanks for the heads-up, Padone.
I'll use empties instead then. Haven't gotten to the point where I'm doing actual animations in Blender yet.
Still trying to get a feel for what's there and what isn't. And where the heck it is!  ;^)

While it is nice to be able to do everything in just one app, and not having to constantly shovel content back and forth between DAZ and Motionbuilder in my case, having separate apps focusing on very specific tasks has definitely its advantages too.
If Maya had a DAZ > Diffeo > Blender workflow to get DAZ content and Iray shaders into Maya the way Diffeo does, I'd work exclusively in Maya because its character animation is very similar to Motionbuilder. But, creating good looking skin shaders is not a trivial task, and I prefer to spend my time creating content rather than tweaking shader nodes all day. And Maya may have its own challenges when trying to fully replace DAZ. The DAZ to Maya bridge unfortunately doesn't create good skin shaders. *sigh*

Anyway, thanks for your help moving down this path, Padone.