How do you unparent a prop from a body part at a certain point in an animation? For Example: You import a walking bvh motion to mike 3 and pose him so so that he is holding a gun.You load a gun prop and parent it to the hands so that the gun will move with the bosy motion. At a certain point in the animation he steps on a land mone and goes flying. How do you unparent the gun from the hands at that point so that the gun doenst floow the character as he goes flying throught the air?? Any help appreciated.

You could make one animation up to the point where the gun is droped, then make another animation for the frames after that. Then splice both together in some video editing application.

I'm talking from total inexperience with Poser animation, but with indepth experience with Poser file internals, and don't ever remember a way to change parent during an animation. All animation keys relate to actor/prop channels, none which are related to parenting (only rotation, offset, translation, scaling, JPs, morphs, dials, etc.). With that in mind, maybe you can just animate the position of the gun with respect to the hands despite them still being parented. So, as the body flys one direction, translate the gun in the other to counteract its motion with the figure body. At least that is an approach until someone more experienced in Poser animation arrives.

From what you describe....probably simplest fix is to insert at the moment of the explosion a translate for the gun so it flies completely out of camera range.

Rendering two animations and splicing is, however, much simpler, and is part of a better way of working anyhow. Oops. I read the original post a little more carefully. I take it you want the gun to actually be dropped and stay in the scene. That's tough to get in a single animation and I wouldn't try it. Hide/unhide can't be animated and more than parenting or conforming can. Possibly transparency can be, and you could do the trick with two guns; one parented, one replacement. But even then you'd have to line them up exactly at the moment of the explosion. Of course, an explosion IS a perfect excuse to flash-out the screen and you can fix a lot of problems during the time the viewer can't see. But that argument works for multiple shots, too, as it would help to hide the join between them.

Message edited on: 10/08/2004 15:43

There is an interesting tutorial on the Curious Labs site which seems to address this issue. They basically suggest that you have two versions of the prop in your scene and use instantaneous scaling to make one appear and the other disappear at the right time. I guess nomuse has already suggested that basic premise, however. Seems like a good workaround....

If you're using Poser 5 you can use animated materials and two gun props. The parented gun will have transparency at zero for the first part of the animation, at the point it should become "unparented" animate the Transparency entry in the root material node, and add a keyframe. Go one frame ahead and set transparency to 1. Same goes for the unparented gun, except that you start with a transparency of 1 and switch to transparency 0 at those two frames. It's also a good idea to set the specular values to zero when the prop must be transparent (animate this property too). I don't know if P4/PP can do this, I'm afraid not. Lining up the two guns is easy: at the moment of explosion, parent the "unparented" gun to the parented gun, set all translations and rotations to zero, and then unparent again. All set.