Parent And Visible Are Key Frame Stored

Lord_Ashes

It seems that changing the Parent of an object or the visibility is not stored in key frame information and thus must be the same for the entire scene. Is this correct? If so, why?

For example, the other day I was working on a animation where a figure picks up an mug (that is sitting on a desk), drinks from it, and the places it back down. In the scene the mug and figure start off a separate objects and the mug is not a child of any of the figure bones so that moving the figure around does not cause the mug to move. However, once the figure grasps the mug, it would be beneficial for the mug's parent to change to the figure hand so that it will automatically follow the figure's hand without having to try to have the mug move along the same path as the hand (which is not desired since changing the path of the hand will then require same adjustments to the mug).

It seems that the easiest way to do this is for the mug to start off being a child of none and then, once the figure grabs it, being a child of the figure's hand. However, in DAZ Studio when you change the object's parent, it affects the change for the entire animation (i.e. the change is not applied to the key frame, it is applied to all frames).

So my next though was that I would have two mugs. One would be child of none and the other would be a child of the figure's hand. Initially, until the figure grasps the mug, the child-of-none-mug would be visible while the child-of-hand-mug would be invisible. When the figure's hand grasps the mug, I would swap the visibilities on the two mugs so that the child-of-hand-mug would be visible and the child-of-none-mug would not. This does not seem to work either because the visible property also seem to be applied to all frames as opposed to being applied to the key frame.

It seems to me that, especially the visible property, these properties should be applied to the key frame and not the entire animation. For example, if the visible property was key frameable then it could be used to make things disappear.

As work around, although I have not tried it, it may be possible to translate the object out of the way of the camera to make it seemingly disappear but this is not an ideal solution because it means that if the camera angle is changed, the disappearing translate may need to be adjusted in order to keep the translation out of view.

Are the Parent and Visible properties intentionally "affect entire timeline" or am I doing something wrong?

Richard Haseltine

It's not unusual for parenting to be non-dynamic - adding it has been a notable feature in a couple of recent application updates. You could scale the items, from 100% down to 0% and vice versa, or you could do two animations (one parented, one not) and splice them together. Those are the time-honoured solutions.

Lord_Ashes

The splitting of the animation is what I opted to go for. This will also reduce my render time if one part of the animation has changed but the other has not.

I do like the scaling solution as a work around (compared to my translation solution) because it will not be dependent on the camera angle. Thanks for the solution.

It just seems like extra work (making two copies of the item) for something that I would expect to be easy especially in DAZ Studio which is centered around their realistic figures and their interaction (i.e. if you are making software which makes animating figures easy you would think that them being able to interact with objects would also be easy).