Can objects be attached and moved in animations?

Is it possible to build an animation using Poser 5 with a ball attached. I'm interested in showing others 'Contact Juggling'. Its moving or juggling one or two balls without leaving the body. Can Objects be attached and moved during animation?

Dao Tiger

Mmmm, I love contact juggling. Looks beautiful. I have a couple of those big round lenses (knackered ones from telescopes I believe?) which I fail miserably to use. David Bowie probably has a lot to answer for regarding my fascination.

As for your questions - I'm no expert, but no, I don't think so. The animation is seperate from any attachment, as in, you can't move an attachment with an animation (unless it's attached to the part of your body you're moving anyway, if that makes sense. It can't be seperate). As a disclaimer - this all may be wrong, I'll let someone more knowledgable give a better answer As far as I'm aware animations control only your body movements.

My initial thought is that since a lot of the moves in contact juggling rely on the ball appearing to float suspended, you could attach a ball to a stationary part of your body such as your chest, and use an animation to move your hands around it. As for sliding it up and down your arm and such like, I would guess that's a no, but I could be wrong (unless of course you're moving your arm and keeping the ball stationary - which I always find more attractive, but could look very 'staged' in SL)

Interesting question though, I'd love to see what others come up with as a solution!

Hmmm----

You CAN move an object with a script - and you can play an animation as well.

So... if you wrote a script to move the ball in the pattern you wanted, then made anims to move your hands and arms to stay in contact, you might be able to make this work. The timing would be VERY difficult and problematic, though, since the execution speed of the script changes depending on the number of scripts running in the sim, and the speed of the anim (generally) does not.

I would love to see this, but it sounds like a LOT of work.

The ball wouldn't move very smoothly, either. llSetPos is the only way to change the positon of an attachment, and it has a hard-coded delay of 0.2 seconds.

There's also the issue of animations being client-side to contend with. An animation won't begin playing on a particular client until it's been downloaded in its entirety to that client. Though you might be able to "preload" the anim for other folks by quickly starting and stopping it, then waiting a few seconds while it downloads to their caches.

Yes, it would definitely be a lot of work.