This tutorial will help you in instances where you need a character to pick up, hold, throw or put down an object. This technique will work with Bipeds as well as custom bone setups. Other examples where this technique will come in handy is a character grabbing, cocking, then firing an arrow; a character dribbling a basketball. Wielding a sword, then throwing it though an unfortunate enemies throat is also a possibility.

We will script some simple expressions to drive the target of our weapon. In this simple setup, we will have a target for the ball on the palm of the hand. Another target will represent our Throw target. We will assign a couple of Custom Attributes to the hand of our Biped. This will control weather the ball is in the palm, as well as oriented to the palm.

Once the setup is complete, it is a flexible technique to control all that your character picks up, puts down and uses.

The following animation was keyframed in about 2 minutes once the controls were set up:

 

If you cannot see the video, you may download it here

 

Before we go any further, I will diagram the final setup of our character, to illustrate our goal setup.