Say I have some simple geometry of a hand, even a mitten - just something that resembles a hand in the way that it can clamp onto something - how best would I approach being able to animate it picking up stationary objects in the scene?

I've been playing around with making bits of primitives RBD/wire/cloth objects, you name it, and the simulations I'm seeing from using the shelf tools are messy at best, and wildly chaotic at worse.

So I've knocked that idea on the head. In 3DSMAX (which I'm coming from) I'd just use link constraints to fluff it. I wanted to get away from that really as simulations are more realistic to look at, but I'm struggling to get the RBD stuff to work without it slipping through its grasp or falling through the collision geo.

Is there any tips or tricks out there for either the RBD stuff or how I can constrain an object to something else in animation like 3DSMAXs link constraints.

don't bother with RBD etc…just rig it

you can use a simple 2-3 bone chain and bind (or parent if it doesn't need to deform) and animate in FK

then use the ‘dynamic parent’ (on the animation shelf) to create and animate the constraint.

please post any questions you have.

Ah magic thanks! That'll do trick yeah. I'm guessing if I wanted RBD for any droppage I could do that in a separate pass outside of the dynamic parent network, since it doesn't seem to like RBDs unless I'm wrong.

you could do the animation of say a hand picking up an object, then write it out to disk
then bring it back in to DOPs and do an RBD sim on it to have it fall out of the hand and break etc…