Using locators and notes

For my animation I needed Moom to hold and pick up the soft toy, in order to to this I needed to use locators. Using locators helps for the object which I want Moom to hold, follow the motion of his hand as I animate. I first turned the invisibility of Mooms surface off, and showed the joints/skeleton of Moom in its place, making it easier to parent a locator with part of the hand skeleton, then parenting the joint and the locator together. This hand would be the hand that the soft toy will follow. I then added another locator in the soft toy, where the hand would pick up the toy and then used the parent option to parent the locator and the toy together. I then parented the hand locator and the toy locator, allowing the soft toy to the movement of the hand, and I can turn off the parent by going into the channel box and setting the locator to off. I found that you cannot key frame the locator, turning it off and on, which I found was a problem as I wanted to animate Moom going to hold the toy before doing so. I found the solution to this problem was to separate the scenes, which helped with organizing the lip syncing and adding more key frames.

Notes: 

+ Create the locator in the Create menu - and place inside the joint you want the prop to move along with.

+ Display - animation - joint size - ensure that you make the joints smaller so that its easier to see the locator and parent it with.

+ Using parent constraint you can make the prop follow the locator in the joint - joint parented with locator and then locator parented with the prop.

+ Easier to animate the main movement first and then add the prop so that it can follow the main movement.

+ Ensure that the offset is ticked so that the movement will be smoother, however if you want the prop to follow a different joint - create another locator with in the joint and parent it with the prop, however in the channels box ensure that the first locator is turned off or the prop will move between the two locators. For this ensure that the offset is turned off to let the prop transition the movement smoothly - however you can keep the offset but will have to translate the prop into the joint.