Hi guys,

I've been making animations in Poser for a while now (to create new units for Civilization III) and I've hit a problem.

I want to make some animations where the character is wielding a weapon or tool with two hands. For example, using a pick, thrusting a pike, or doing some digging. Now clearly this is harder to do than with a one-handed implement. To make the character wave a one-handed sword about, you need only put the sword in his hand, parent it, and then move his arm about. But with a two-handed sword he needs to keep both hands on the sword at all times. Ideally, I need to be able to parent the weapon to both hands at once. Or, even better, I need to parent it to one hand and then parent the other hand to the weapon.

As it is, I have to treat the prop like a one-handed prop by parenting it to the right hand and moving that. Then I have the extremely tedious task of manually moving his other hand, frame by frame, so that it looks like it's holding onto the prop all the time. This is not only tedious but hard: it is very easy to move the right arm/prop combination in a way that is actually physically impossible for him to get his left hand onto it properly.

The ideal, ideal solution would be to parent the prop to both hands and switch on IK chains for both arms, with the prop as the final element. Then I could just move the prop and his hands would remain glued to it, so he would move his arms in the proper way. Think how easy it would be to do (say) a mining action with a pickaxe this way. And think how difficult it is to make that action using the move-one-hand-manually method described above!

So is anything like this possible? Can I somehow parent a prop to two hands, or at least mimic such a thing? Any advice would be massively appreciated.