Animators, you know the problem: you want to pick up and put down an object, or throw it, or jump off a moving train. In order to make it work right, you either have to splice PZ3s, or set up a phantom object. Here's a solution. This script sets up a parent-child connection only during the specified frames.

Here's how the animation is set up before applying the script.... Note that the ball is placed where it needs to be when Posette grabs it.

Here's the control panel as it was filled in for this animation. "Standard" mode sets up the usual kind of parenting, where the child follows both the translation and rotation of the parent part. "Parallel" is something I've always wanted to have available, for situations like sternum-and-ribs, or piston-and-crankshaft. The child follows only the translations of the parent but not the rotations. "Trajectory" is used here: Standard up to the moment of detachment, then the child object continues the motion given in the last few frames. the

And here's the result of applying the Trajectory. Script is in freestuff, under Utilities.

ocham! How absolutely superb of you to share these scripts with us. Haven't yet dipped my toes into scripting but have collected all the ones you and others have shared here. So soonish I'll give'em a go and no doubt thrill myself. Thanks to you and all the sharing souls on these boards!!! Cheers masha

Thank you, I think you just made my life easier! Very usefull.

Fantastic ockham! This is just super... well done!

As usual, let me know how it works and where it fails to work.

I'm trying to setup a animation where a character grabs a ball and then drops it. I tried this script, and it didn't work as expected. Is there a way for the ball not to move to what I'm assuming is the origin of the hand? I attempted to place a sphere set to not visible in the right hand of my character. And I made the ball child via foster of the sphere in the characters hand. Instead of attaching and moving with the hand, the ball went flying backwards. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Brian

The exact location will require some adjustment, as I recall. The script ties the origin of the ball to the origin of the hand, as you guessed; you'll probably have to use Display Origin and adjust the three Origin dials to make it look right. ------------- As for the backward movement: Not quite clear from your description, but it sounds like you're [ordinary]parenting a ball to the hand, then [foster]parenting another ball to the first ball? Have you tried just [foster]parenting the thrown ball to the hand? The script does work with that arrangement, but I never tried a double-parenting......

Bravo ockham!

I can't seem to figure out how to tweak the origin of the hand. Is there a way that the script could be configured to offset the child object from the parent objects origin coordinates..such and such a distance? Would be a great addition. Brian

Indeed that is a problem. The hand's Center can be adjusted, by opening the Joint Editor (alt-W-J) but that will make it look weird, as in this picture. I arbitrarily changed the Y value of Center, and gave poor Misaki a broken arm. Can't you get the right positioning by adjusting only the Origin of the ball itself? A picture of your setup might help me to visualize what's going on.

This is the basic setup of what I'm trying to do, I think you can grasp the concept from the picture. Grab the ball, lift it up, look at it, and the arm twists and drops the ball. Thanks for the quick replies. Brian

The picture helps. Try rotating the ball to begin with, so that its origin will be at the center of the wrist joint. See if that makes it go better....

Tried it, the ball is still passing through the hand, and not properly parenting. Its odd that you can parent an object in Poser directly and it sticks, but Foster doesn't seem to parent the same way. Any other ideas you have? I tried moving the origin on the ball and that just caused rotation problems. Origin on hand, deformations, like you observed. Rotating ball, a bit better, but doesn't help much. I even tried each of the variables with all the different foster settings to see if that might affect it. I may have to resort to the whole size and keyframe adjustment of balls, was hoping foster could do the trick. Hope you can come up with an idea. Brian

Here is a screencap of what happens and I'm trying to avoid. I'd like to get this to work, would expedite animating quite a lot. Brian

It's been a year since I looked closely at that script, but I do remember that same phenomenon. Couldn't seem to get around it. Tried anticipating the motion, but that just made things worse.