Dynamic Parenting
When you parent and object to another object it is stuck to that object for the entire length of the animation. Sometimes you want to be able to animate these relationships. For instance when you want an character to pick up an object and drop it off somewhere else. Here's how to do that in LightWave
Say you have a scene where a ball needs to be picked up at frame 30. You need to have it stick to it's spot at frame 0. Place a NULL object (Items tab → Add → Null, call it "BallStart") at the start position.
While on frame 0, select your ball (add one if you don't have one in your scene yet) and hit m to open its motion panel. In the IK and Modifiers Tab, click on Add Modifier and from the list that pops up select Parenter. Double Click on the name of the modifier to open its properties panel (you can also click on Edit next to Add Modifier and select properties, while the modifier is selected (highlighted)
At the bottom of the Dynamic Parents window click on Parent. Select the null you just created in the window that pops up. Leave Keep initial position and Keep initial rotation selected. Click on OK. The top entry on the parenter modifier should now read 00000 BallStart, indicating that from frame 0 on, the object will be parented to the object called "BallStart"
Move to frame 30. Assuming you want to have the object picked up by an object called "Hand", you repeat the above process but now choose "hand" as the new parent so that the second line reads "00030 Hand"
If you animate the "BallStart" or the "Hand", you will see that the ball is stuck to the first one until frame 30, after that it is following the "Hand". In the schematic view, the dynamic parenting is represented by dotted lines
Note that what happens is that when you parent an object to another object, there is a keyframe set for the child object storing the offset between the parent and the child object. That is: unless you uncheck Keep initial position and Keep initial rotation. Removing the dynamic parent will not remove these keyframes, so you might have to go in and remove them manually
Here is a zip file containing the objects and scene used to create the movie shown at the top of this page: DynamicParent.zip