Have a character grab a prop

- With a little trickery you can have your character grab an object and manipulate it live as you're recording. (upbeat music) so I want my character to reach over and grab this bottle like this and then be able to put it right back down. It's a lot easier than it looks, so let's take a look at the layout here. So for my Bob 2D character, let's go over and take a look rig. So I have a couple things going on.

I have my reach hand, which is the hand that comes out as it's reaching for, and turn that one off, reaching for a bottle. You see I've put a dragger on that hand. That allows me, when I reach out, to drag that arm around so I can stretch it out to go behind that bottle. Now that's important in this case, and I have a bottle on a second layer, which is up above the head. It's not attached to the head or the body, but it is attached to the character.

It's within the Bob folder. So under bottle I have bottle and I have no bottle, which there's nothing in it. It's just a blank frame. So let me show you what's happening there. So for the hand that reaches out, when I click the V key, I'll turn this on and off with this down under the reach hand too. There is bottle held, there's the reaching hand, and then bottle held hand. The bottle held hand is one that's actually holding the bottle.

So what I did is when I want it to reach the bottle, I put in a trigger. If I hover over it you see it's a V. I can also come over here and I can click on that. If I click on V, bottle held. So what it does, it turns on the hand that is holding the bottle, but it also triggers the bottle, no bottle, this one up here. So when the hand grabs the bottle, this bottle disappears. So there are two things that are happening here when I have my hand reaching out.

When I press the V key, the hand that's on the arm switches out with the hand that's holding the bottle, and the other things that's happening is the bottle that's on the table is in its own folder or own group, and when I click the V key it switches out with an empty frame. So the bottle just disappears. So that'll slide a hand, when I reach out and click the V key, it looks like it's grabbing, and all it is is two different things are switching out for one another. Now something to keep in mind to make sure that this works for you is, so in your rigging area, you want to make sure that here under triggers that you have latch selected, and you also want to make sure that you have with whatever layer has your trigger attached to it like here on no bottle, that you have under keyboard trigger selected find others in group.

So that now when no bottle, the empty frame gets selected, the bottle itself disappears, it hides it. So playing with this character is actually one of my favorite things to do, with picking up the bottle back and forth. One of the things I play with to see if I can make it look like I'm throwing the bottle down from a distance, and it still works. Kind of like having my own animated action figure. So much fun. (upbeat music)