Animating characters with objects

If you've watched Valve's Half Life 2 documentary, you probably remember how they talk it's a pain in the butt aligning objects to characters. This is true! For example, here we have to give our girl the flask. Timeline does a perfect job aligning an object to a character, but how do we seamlessly switch two alignments (between the two chars)?

We can bang ourselves against the wall for a long time trying to match two alignments (like I did in Haven for Thought), or we can use a bit of planning. One object can be aligned perfectly to both hands if it is done at the same time from the same position!

So first, we have it aligned to male's hand and we animate the male's "giving" animation (or rather, half of it) just to move the flask into place (pic. 1).

Then we want the girl's hand to be holding the flask right at the same spot, so we can align it at the moment she would take it. So we puppeteer the hand with our controller for natural motion, bring it more or less at the flask and then stop (pic. 2). We need precision here, so now we will keyframe the hand exactly where we want her to grab it and pose the fingers accordingly (pic. 3).

Now we are at a perfect spot for transitioning alignments. In my case, this is done via separate Timeline controlling the flask. So I take already existing animation "atmalehand" and make a new one with the same position. I simply de-attach the flask Control from male's hand and attach it to female's hand without moving anything.

I've set blend duration to 0.3s so all we have to do now is account for that in our animation (let the flask giving moment hang in there for 0.3s so that the flask align transition is settled).

We have succesfully given her the flask! We can now finish both animations: male getting back into idle and her transitioning into her drinking anim (pic. 4).

We've just spent at least 40min doing 9s of animation :D But that's normal, as long as it looks great. I still have some issues to fix within the drinking itself, so I'm hard at work at adult animations so that I will have spare time for that fix.