box grabbing

[matt111]

hey anyone know a good way to animate a robot grabbing a box? we used the box switch visibilty thing but does anyone know other ways. we are trying to pick up a box, stack it, and pick up another box. any ideas would be helpful

over and out

[Tyler Olds]

I woudl say the best and simplist way is to just move the box and the arm at the same time, if you need to pivot, go to hierachy and adjust the pivot points of all the objects to be in the place that you want it to be in.

[Daishichimaru]

Easy trick:
1. Make two boxes
2. Make one a child of the arms that grab
3. Position the other exactly where the robot will be grabbing the box
4. Put a visibility track on both boxes
5. Animate the track so that the unparented box on the floor fades to transparency right when the arm would latch on.
6. Make the box that's a child of the arm become visible on the frame where the unparented box becomes invisible.

This way you don't have your box jumping all over the place trying to keep it still and then in time with the robot. If he's dropping another box off just use three. Or, if you're really worried about polycount, you can make a keyframe for the box sitting still and copy that into every frame where the box would be still but leave it free where it would be carried by the robot. Same thing with a bit less flexibility and a lot more annoyance.

[Sunny Thaper]

The absolute best way, and take it from me, this is the best, is link constraint. Look for it in Max help file. Here's a little blurb for you.

A link constraint enables the robot arms to pass a ball.

A Link constraint is used to animate an object linking from one target object to another.

The Link constraint causes an object to inherit the position, rotation, and scale of its target object.

An example of using a link constraint is to pass a ball from one hand to another. Assume that at frame 0 the ball is in the right hand. The hands are animated to meet at frame 50, where the ball is passed to the left hand, and then spread apart until frame 100.