Animating Object Interactions

[br1an]

Hi guys,

Could you help out a novice like me in Animation/Set-up (Maya 7.0)?
I've done some basic ones (walk cycle, basic pose to pose,a bit of acting)
and I want to take it to the next step with object interaction.

Here's a sample of my recent work...a mock tv-ad...please don't expect much. LOL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to5HTlgXjgo

What's your basic workflow in involving interaction with other geometry?
(Where you don't need to fix your camera to hide penetration)

1. Take for example a character holding & shooting a gun.
   1.1) Do you really just animate the fingers/geometry one by one/frame by frame
   so they don't penetrate the gun geometry?
   1.2) I'm guessing constraints are used in this. Do you guys have a special set-up/animation workflow so
   the object looks like its really being held versus looking like it's just attached
   to your character? (I noticed this effect w/ my mock tv-ad above)

2. A character holding a doll - Does the doll get rigged and animated pose-to-pose to achieve
   the follow-thru needed keeping in mind to avoid penetration?

3. A dangling tie on a character - rigged geometry or soft bodies?
   (Don't know soft bodies,I will have to look into this if its the case)

I thank you in advance for the advice.
I promise to also help a new guy out if the time comes that I get better at this.(paying it forward...LOL)

[gmask]

In general you would constrain the object being held to a joint near where it's being held and then in animating the fingers try to place them so that they do not intersect too much or in a bad way with the gun or whatever.

If you have Maya Unlimited you could use cloth to animate a tie dynamically if not you would bind the tie to a skeleton and probably just manually animate it.

[br1an]

@gmask

thanks for the tip gmask... ...i'll keep this in mind once i'm done rigging my character
and i hope better object interactions won't be too much of a headache as i'm fearing it would be.
crossing fingers