Clear parent an object after a certain keyframe

Support Animation and Rigging
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1

I am working on a test project in blender. A sword fight. My characters have swords parented to one of their hands. At one point one of the characters dies and I want him to drop the sword. However, if I move the sword it will obviously move if the hand moves, which makes this task almost impossible to achieve in my scenario. My workaround for this is to create a completely separate file, where the sword was never parented to the hand and just record the ending in that file.

If I clear parent after the keyframe that I want, the object will return to the place where it was originally parented.

However, I wish to know if there Is a way to unparent an object after a certain keyframe, without it returning to the place where it was originally parented? (So the object is parented for a certain number of keyframes and unparented for the rest.)

Thank you.

P.S I am new to Blender. Please, don’t make the explanation too difficult.

3

There isn’t a way to unparent an object during an animation. Parenting is forever.

But-- there are constraints which can be animated. One of those is a “child of” constraint, which acts just like parenting, but which can be animated on or off by animating its influence.

If you don’t want to change what you already have, an alternative to this is to create an empty and give your sword a “copy transforms” constraint targeting the empty, then animate the influence of that constraint. Then, whenever the copy transforms constraint is active, the sword will basically end up ignoring your hand.