When creating an animation in Poser 4 I have a problem with the following: 1. If I "Parent" an object to a figure's hand then I move the figure to a new location where I unparent the object in order to have the figure drop it on a table; the object is treated as unparented from the beginning of the animation. 2. If, at some point, I add an object to a scene the object appears in the entire animation instead of starting at that keyframe. 3. If I try to make an object invisible at some point, it is invisible for the entire animation. It appears that Poser does not store settings in each keyframe but uses the last settings universally. Is there any way around this, or am I doing something wrong? Any advice you can give me will be appreciated.

The only thing that can vary during an animation is parameter dial settings. When I wanted a character to disappear part way thru an animation, I scaled its BODY down to very small. If you want to e.g., change parentage part way thru, you will have to make two animations and splice them together end-to-end.

Hi To do what you want you need to use another prop and position it where the character drops or sets it on the table and also use the one parented to the character. Make sure you are at the first frame of the animation. Select each of the props and go to the parameter dials and double click on the scale dial which will open the properties for the dial and set the Min to "0" and Value to "100" for the prop parented to the character and Min to "0" and Value to "0" for the other prop. Now go to the animation palette and change the interpolation to constant (the gray color) for both of these props.This way the nothing will happen until the keyframe where your character set the prop down Move to the frame where the character sets the prop down. and set the scale value to "0" for the prop parented to the character and "100" for the other prop. The prop on the table will become visible and the other prop will disappear. This is the only way I have got it work in Poser. Hope this helps you some. Ed

Keeping in line with Anthony's comments, here is something else you can try. Say I have a ten frame animation of Poser Dude holding a ball and in frame 7 I want him to drop the ball onto the floor. I load Poser Dude, parent the ball to his hand, and set the frames 1 to 7 and save these to the library as a pose preset. Next I open the animation edit window and select all elements for Poser Dude and do a break frame at frame 7. Then using the hierarchy editor I make Poser Dude invisible except for the ball. I load in a second Poser Dude(2)and apply the pose preset 1-7 to him. I advance to frame 10, select the ball and position it on the floor, and position Poser Dude(2) as I want him to end up at that frame. Now when I run through the frames the ball appears to be Poser Dude(2)'s hand, until I get to frame 8 at which point it will began traveling downward toward the floor [still parented to the now invisible and unchanging Poser Dude(1)]

If a character or prop is zero size and then between one frame and the next becomes full size, you may have to make sure that the interpolation used is linear, else unwanted cubic spline fitting may cause odd behavior.

P.S. Talking about interpolating, what is a quaternion? Is it part of a UFO's motor, or what?

Shadownet's solution with two Poser Dudes sounds a real right fudge. Lets hope that in Poser 5 we can change parentage of a part partway thru an animation.

Thanks Anthony. Just for info purposes. Also did a pretty cool transformation this way as well in which I had Posette change into a leopard woman. However instead of making one invisible, I simply used the size dials to hide the leopard woman figure inside the normal Posette in frame 1 and then did the opposite at frame 10 thus creating the effect as the animation ran the frames. As for quaternion. Not sure but isn't that what them aliens eat?

Anthony I use my technique all the time. I've never had any problems as long as I set the interpolation to constant..linear will work too but you have to set additional keyframes so Poser doesn't get confused and messes up all your hard work. Ed

Sorry, I wasn't intending to be rude to Shadownet.

I made an .AVI of my suction-dredger-sub model going past and in passing it extended its suction tube sideways and sucked up an unauthorized scuba diver. I wanted to parent the diver to the sub from the moment of capture but not before, and that inability caused me complications.

I want to thank everyone for their excellent suggestions.