can anyone tell me, whats the best way to set up a reload animation in MB eg

taking a magazine out of the weapon amd then throwing it away and then putting another magazine into the gun .. 

theres a weapon bone in the magazine

many thanks

One way is to animate it useing the multi refeference constraint on the clip so you can switch its parent space from gun to hand to world

look over the help file on multi reference constraint to get an idea on how it works.

Brad Clark
Co-Founder: Rigging Dojo-Teaching the art and science of character rigging
Author: Inspired 3D Advanced Rigging
The Character Animator Toolkit for Motionbuilder :available now:

Hi suffy,

The MotionBuilder documentation includes a basic example showing setup with Passenger being constrained to car object with Multi-Ref Constraints.

You should be able to work from the example to get what you need with magazine/gun reload. The section in the documentation that covers multi-ref constraints is:-

Animating with Constraints- Multi-Referential Constraint

The foundation learning tools on Autodesk.com MotionBuilder page also cover basic constraints setup in video which should help you understand how to work with basic constraints:-

MotionBuilder – Foundation learning Tools- Introduction to Constraints
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/ser...81904#channels_Foundation Learning Tool

For the setup with Magazine/Gun you could also use a basic Parent/Child Constraints and animate the Weight on the constraint so that the object is linking to and from the hand. Constraint weight can be keyed from the Constraint Settings or from the FCurves Window.

It is also possible to animate your constraints through a Story Window Constraints track. There is a tutorial explaining how to set this up in the Area – Tutorials section:-

Scheduling Constraints with the Story Window
http://area.autodesk.com/tutorials/scheduling_constraints_with_the_story_window

Best Regards,

Lee