Very simple problem, I have a sword that I parent to a sheath parented to the hip of a character, I need to draw the sword and parent it to the right hand, then after a fighting session parent it to another characters chest (you get the idea).

There are lots of other things going on in this scene, so I don't want to create separate files for each bit of that, but whenever I re-parent any object it seems to affect all frames instead of current and future frames.

Is there any way past this?

thanks

Attached Link: E-Frontier tutorial - Digital Sleight of Hand

If you're going to do this as one long animation (rather than break it up into various scenes with different camera angles), then you need 3 sword props - one parented to the scabbard, one to the hand, and one to the victim's chest. Then you need to control the visibility of each prop until you need it. There are various ways you can do this:

• Use the scale of them item and move it from 0 to 100 on the frame you need it to become visible (set the frame before to 0), and vice versa for making it invisible;
• Use the visibility of the prop (i believe this has become animatable in later versions of Poser, but I may be wrong), again making sure you set the frame before to the alternate state, so that you get a quick transition;
  *Using the materials room and playing with the transparency settings of the prop's materials.

E-Frontier has a tutorial looking at this technique (see link) - they do it with a hat parented to a character's hand, and its head - but there's no reason why this can't be extrapolated to three items, as you wish. I scatually did a similar trick once, to create an animation of a deck of cards being dealt out onto a table. If I can find it, I'll upload the animation onto this site so you can see the finished results.

Hope this helps.

JonTheCelt

**jonthecelt, thanks, I used the scale solution for other animations just thought there might be a better solution really messy having a new prop every time an interaction happens that changes the placement, starting to think it might be better just to leave parenting out of it and move the sword independently, lot more work but cleaner.

hope next poser version has animation re-parenting settings... can only dream lol.

thanks again for clearing this up.**