Releasing the ball
Some relationships weren’t meant to last. It’s time for Rain to let go, and for the ball to move on! First, we’ll animate a throwing motion for Rain, followed by the ball leaving Rain’s hand as she opens her fingers.
Among other things, this requires that we apply (and key) the effect of constraints on a few things.
Animating a throwing/tossing motion
Okay, so here’s the thing: to animate the ball leaving Rain’s hand, we need to determine where it will be in global space at the moment when she releases it:
- To do that, we need to animate Rain’s arm throwing it.
- To do that, we need to transition from using IK instead of FK for the right arm by keying the FK/IK Switch property for the right arm.
- To do that, we have to key the visual rotation of the FK bones so that when we switch to them, the arm doesn’t go like this:
Figure 10.21: FK bones for the right arm...