I've benefitted much from tips on this forum, so maybe I can give back a little. I've been playing around with animating Poser characters and came up with a way to do something that at first seemed near impossible. Say, for example, you're trying to make a figure discard a shirt they're wearing - take it off and drop it to the floor. If it's "conformed", that may be difficult by just lowering the "y" space coordinate. That won't work on some items. But, you can "bend" the item to the front, or back, to partly remove it. Then you trick the system. At that step in the animation, you reduce the scale of that discarded item to "0" and it disappears. Lock in the zero with the "break spline" command so it won't reappear. Then introduce a second item identical to the first, but NOT CONFORMED, at the location the other went to zero, and move the second to the floor (or whereever) with animation. Alternately, instead of setting scale to "0", you can drop it on one animation step to a "y" value far below the scene and lock that setting in. I know some of you experts probably figured this out a long time ago, but maybe somebody new (like me) hasn't, so - for what it's worth - good animating.

Great tip....Thanks . skee

Great tip....Thanks . skee

Or another way of doing it is if you have Propack where you can animate the materials and make the first shirt totally transparent. Or have two shirts in the same pose with only one conformed and making different groups of one invisible and groups of the other visible throughout the animation. Any way you do it its going to take some patience but thanks for the inspiration.

Yeah, it had occurred to me that you could make the object invisible, but I hadn't gotten around to trying that yet. Thanks for the comment.

Sometimes I move an object far away (say below the floor) when I don't want to see it anymore in the animation. Sometimes I render an animation in two (or more) parts, changing things in the second file. I must admit I had not tried setting the size to zero.

doozy, you say you render an animation in two parts. Is there a way to couple two separate parts together? I haven't found that.

Scaling the items is by far the easiest way to do this. It works for having a figure pick up or set down an object. Ed

Here is another trick along these line. Use a second figure, duplicate of the first but invisible and parent the clothing to it (visible) Match poses for both up to the point that you want the clothing to come off, than freeze the invisible figure but continue to move the clothing so that it matches up with the visible figure as it discards to the floor or whatever. You can now have your visible figure turn cartwheels butt naked it you like and the article of conforming clothing will stay put on the floor where it lays. I have also done this in conjuction with what you sort of suggested, and used the dials to hide the clothes on the visible figure and make the clothing on the invisible figure visible - such as making a pair of closed pants open, etc.

doozy, you say you render an animation in two parts. Is there a way to couple two separate parts together? I haven't found that.<<< I'm on Mac. Open the first animation, drag and drop the second animation in. Done. Didn't someone recently say Windows was as easy to use as a Mac?

I use a Mac also. Didn't know about this little trick. I'll have to give it a try. And by the way, no one will ever convince me that Windows is as easy to use as a Mac. I've worked with both.