Parent Bone is Shareware. The current fee is $20.00 US. Please send check, money order, or anything cashable by a US bank, along with your address to:

Parent Bone
PO BOX 621
Oldsmare FL.
34677-0621
USA

Please note that the fee only applies if this plugin is used for commercial work.

I may also be reached at danimator@sprintmail.com
Please send any comments you would like to make. I would like to know who is using this plugin, and how it may be improved.

Parent Bone: the Revenge
is an Lscript plugin that was written because I couldn't get Newtek's ParentBone plugin to work.
It provides additional fucntionality as well, including...

parent, unparent
temporal offset (use with IK to make "drag behind" bones for tails, floppsy ears, flowing hair...)

My main reason for writing it was to produce an animated character who's big floppy ears bounced around realistically, whithout having to be keyframed. I did this by parenting Null objects to each bone in the ear, then making the nulls into IK goals for each bone. The result was quite pleasing, and required no keyframes. I can now think of plenty of other applications for the same technique.

To run it, select "Motion Plug-ins" from the motion panel, then select "LScript I/A" from the drop down list and select this plugin. note, "I/A" stands for "Item Animation"

Known limitations:

I havn't figured out how lightwave's freaky world coordinate system works with bones, so using the rotation from a chain of bones doen't work yet. Try Lock & Key.

Cloning an object with this plugin assigned is not supported. You must set up a fresh plugin for each object.

There seems to be a problem with lscript on some machines running Windows NT related to the requester interface that may cause premature execution of the process method in the program, and the scope of the requester to be lost. This may potentially lead to crashes in lightwave.

This script and any code included within is copyright 1998 Daniel Ritchie. All rights reserved. It is provided without warenty of any kind.