Maya Nose Picking

Having gotten to the point of the snow man picking his nose up, I had to try to find a way of making it move up from the floor with his hand, then detach from the hand and stay on the face. I tried out the idea of having a carrot already in the hand, and one already on the face with the visibilities switched off, then toggling the visibilities between them during different parts of the movement to create the illusion of one carrot being picked up and placed on the face. As the carrots hadn't been parented to the snowman at the point of his creation, they didn't move properly with the bend and squash deformers. The first attempt to solve the problem involved creating a new locator in the hand, and using a parent constraint on the carrot to attach it to the new locator for the duration of the movement. The carrot came up with the arm, but drifted out of the hand sideways as it did so. The next solution was using a piece of script called Rivet. The Rivet locator was placed in the hand, and the locator for the carrot was aim constrained to it. This succeeded in keeping the carrot in place as the arm came up to the face. The next problem occurred when trying to detach the carrot and leave it in place on the face. When the parent constraint was turned off, to allow the carrot to leave the hand, it snapped back to its original position on the ground. The solution to this was duplicating the carrot when the arm had it in place on the face, deleting the constraint in the duplicate, and switching the visibility off in the carrot in the hand. There you go. Putting a nose on a snowman. Easy as.