ik as adaptation

Hi everyone. First post here so I hope you’ll bear with me.


I’m having a tough time finding a solution to an animation conundrum that I’m facing. I have a mortar like object that I want to reload with a set of FPS hands.

The reloading itself would essentially consist of taking the barrel apart from the base object itself, placing a piece of ammunition inside the barrel and assembling the barrel to the base again.
The angle of the mortar barrel can be anything between 0 and 90 degrees.

The thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around, is how I should approach constructing this animation. Currently I’m wondering if the best approach would be to make two individual animations, one for the mortar barrel coming apart and one for the hands grabbing the barrel, and lastly somehow matching/syncing them up inside unity using inverse kinematics to account for the varying barrel angles.

I hope someone can spare me some advise on how I would approach this correctly and if what I have in mind is even doable this way. Thank you in advance!