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can you temporary parent?
Hello. I”m working on animation in after effects 6.5. I have a 3d figure walking in 3d space. To all move together I parented all the limbs, hands, neck head etc. to the body. This way I can move the body or rotate the body when it needs to turn and all the other parts come with.
the problem is with the legs. I rotate them seperately on an axis to create the up down motion of the leg and parent the leg with the body to achieve the moving forward motion in unison. On the first step of the stride I parent the left leg with the body and everything is cool. but for the next step I don’t want the left leg to follow but the right. Is the parenting option is an all or nothing for the sequence? I don’t see on option to toggle this on and off during the timeline of an animation.
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2 Replies
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My apologies I forgot to ask about why keyframes are not laid down for the layers attached to parent layer. They move in space as well but only keyframe registered is for the parent. Where as if I had not done any parenting and just used the shift key to highlight (or group) the layers in the timeline when one layer is moved and keyframe registered all the highlighted layers get a keyframe.
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I don’t really understand why you’d need to unparent the “Off” leg. Dan uses parenting here to achieve one walk cycle, then loops that with an expression for a continuous walk in Animating a Walk-Cycle Using Loop Expressions :
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/ebberts_dan/layer_looping.php
Here is his version of IK, I just go there as it makes the legs and arms respond to hand and foot movement, make one cycle, the loop:
https://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/ik.html
I haven’t set that up in 3D, looks like it needs code for the z, but did do the first (above) in 3D and it worked fine.
To answer your questions, that’s the way parenting works in AE, the Child is really a Slave, for life… unless you select that leg layer when you don’t want it parented, and Edit>Split Layer, then unparent the newly created upper layer of the leg, you could then Split the layer again if you wanted to re-parent it to the trunk. Sounds like a hassle, but if you only need one cycle, then loop, it’s not that big a deal.
There are way to set up a check box and turn expression simulated parenting on/off, but it’s a bigger work around.
Note: You can still set keyframes for the children, position say, but that movement will be added to the parent movement.
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