I would appreciate one of you mavens answering this conundrum for me: Say I take a scaled up gorilla figure and "parent" a Faye Wray figure to his hand. I bring her up to the King Kong's shoulder. Now I want her to sit on his shoulder so I "unparent" her. As expected, she loses her spatial coordinates without the parenting reference. How do I unparent in mid animation and keep my figure's coordinates? I know how to do this in other apps using a variety of tools such as nulls and coordinate systems. How do I do this in Poser? THANKS GUYS!

You can't change parenting in the middle of a PZ3. The most practical method is to split your PZ3 into two parts. Save the PZ3 first. Move the timeline to the point where Faye needs to leave King's hand. Do an Edit:Memorize All. Move the timeline back to frame 1; do Edit:Restore All. Clear the frame counter to 1, then save as a new (second part) PZ3. After this, you can parent Faye to UNIVERSE and let her run free.

Superb. God, how did we ever get along without the net and discussion forums?

Incidentally, there's another common trick:
Make two copies of the object, one parented
to the hand and the other 'waiting' at the
dropoff point. Scale the free one to zero
at start. When you reach the dropoff, abruptly
scale the free object up to 100% and the
in-hand object down to 0.

This works well with single objects like
balls, but would be dubious and wasteful
with a full figure; sometimes attached parts
like hair don't scale properly.

Message edited on: 04/01/2005 12:22

Yes. I tried a variation of that with a nest of scaling problems resulting. Your initial suggestion seems to be the most elegant given the limitations of Poser.

Actually sometimes you can unparent.

Create the animation up to the point of unparenting, then open the animation pallet, the big one with all the key frames ( [ctrl]+[shift]+V ) add keys to every thing for the parented figure up to the point of exchange.

Now unparent the figure. Poser should re-calculate all the keys to match the new locations.

Conduct some expiriments before going for the real animation.

Nerd3D P.S. The hidden figure method Ockham suggests is usually easier. I only use the key frame method when the parented object is really complex and slows things down too much to have two in the scene.

Message edited on: 04/01/2005 13:44

Why not, instead of scaling, turn off visibility? Or is that another no-no amid a pz3?

The visibility can't be keyed. If you are rendering to frames you can do that. Stop the rendering at the exchange point, switch the visibility and then resume the rendering. Nerd3D

"...After this, you can parent Faye to UNIVERSE and let her run free." ockham

"Superb. God, how did we ever get along without the net and discussion forums?" thedoctor

Thedoctor, one suggetstion: You should refrain from addressing ockam as God. Yes, it is true that ockham knows more about Python for Poser than God does, but this is a monotheistic forum; there is only one God, and his name is Dr. Geep.