I am new to animating, as in I never messed with it in poser before, and I have encountered a problem. Scenario: Figure 1 has a prop attached to left thigh. (i.e. a gun or sword) It's parent is the thigh so that during the animation it will move with it. The Figure pulls the sword for the next part of the animation which would require changing parent to the right hand. Problem: When changing the parent in mid animation, it seems that it sets it for the entire process...thus changing its original position at the beginning of the frames. Does anyone have a tutorial online or a know how as to how to change parents in the middle of an animation? Thanks, ~Anthony

You can't change parents in the middle of one PZ3. But you can take the PZ3 up to the point where you change hands, then start a new PZ3 with the sword parented to the other hand. Or, you can start with two swords, one in each hand. Scale down to zero the one you're not using; when it's time to switch, scale the first sword down to zero and bring the second one up to its original.

There IS a tutorial out there, somewhere... while I'm searching for it in another window, I'll give a brief lowdown on how this is done. I've done a similar trick before with someone dealing cards, moving a card from the deck, to the hand, to the table. Ok, the links at the top of the page. Now, to summarise... To do what you want to do (drawing the sword from the scabbard), you actually need TWO sword props. One remains parented to your character's hand, the other to the sheath/thigh. See, the thing is that you can't change parents mid-animation... what you CAN do is animate the transparency of the two objects. At the beginning, set the transparency of the sword in your character's hand to 1 (transparency edge to 1 as well), with the sheathed sword fully visible. Create the movements for your character as normal. Now, at the point where your figure grabs hold of the sword, swap the transparency settings over. Before doing this, make sure that the trans channels are set to animatable. Finally, you want to make sure that there's a sharp transition from invisible to visible. To do this, either step back a frame, and reset the channels to the frame one settings, or go into the animation palette, and change the interpolation style for the two swords' transparencies to the linear selection. Hope this helps. jonthecelt

Attached Link: http://www.e-frontier.com/article/articleview/1046/1/320

Thank you guys so very much for the help!

Too modest to mention your "foster parenting" script, ockham?

Actually for what I wanted to pull off the foster parent script wouldn't work...(but will work great in some other Ideas I have for the series :D). However the scaling idea worked f**kin PERFECT!! It is exactly what I wanted to accomplish and with very little added effort....beautiful....If I can get an animated gif uploaded on Rosity I'll post it in the image library since as of yet I do not have the actual website of mine up yet. Again thank you guys for everything!

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=1154583&Start=1&Sectionid=1&filter_genre_id=0&WhatsN