Parent Constraint is a nightmare to work with

[sendtosamkim]

Issue 1:
Constraint (even if I turn off "Enable Rest Position" in the Constraint Attributes) makes the Constrained object jump to random place, after which I have to manually re-position by keyframing it immediately on the frame in which Constraint turns on for that object. 
Issue 2:

When removing Constraint, which should be easy enough, the Constrained object now is messed up in position at some point even when its keyframes do not change at all in the Graph Editor.
Issue 3:

It is SO time-consuming to constantly go back and forth in time, just to get the constrained object in the correct position, because the Constrained object WILL NOT behave as expected depending on how finnicky you are with moving the Time needle.

Issue 4:

If you re-open a new version of 2024 Maya (because the shelf editor of Animation is completely grayed out all of a sudden for unknown reason), your Parent Constraint gets completely scrambled, so your controllers are literally teleporting.

[stephenkmann]

I'm not exactly sure what you are trying to do.. 

but in your video. while you are removing the target in the parent constraint. the object is still constrained to "longsword" and you are keying the weight of "longsword target" to 0.  which means Nothing is acting upon the control. and it will be left behind. 

* you can see when the weight is 0. the control doesn't move. and when it's 1 it follows the longsword.   This is exactly what I would expect it to do. 

* why are you removing targets from the parent constraint? 

The second part of the video. I have no ideas what you are trying to do or what the issue is.  

I think you have somehow messed up the constraints ?   Maybe created a cycle and constrained it to itself?   

As for the grayed out shelf, that is some other issue that has nothing to do with your parent Constraints..

It looks to me that those constraints have gotten messed up by adding / removing targets and keying weights to 0 

for the first issue. Keep the target you removed. at 0.  or swap the values or It looks like you need to add the original controls parent as a target.  Constraints completely take over an objects positions. 

hth

-=s

[sendtosamkim]

Hey, thanks for replying. But have you tried working with Parent Constraints where you want to constrain an object for a few frames and make the object free for a while then re-constrain it to the same Master or a different Master?

[stephenkmann]

Yes,

  You can do this a number of ways. ( here are two ways to do what you are doing ) 

• Constrain the control to 2 different objects, and change the weights from one to the other
• constrain the control to what you want it to follow, and then Key the control. this will add a BlendParent channel on the control.  You can then key the weight of this channel to blend between the constraint object, and the animation that you have added. 

hth

-=s

[sendtosamkim]

I am familiar with blend parent. The issue that I am talking about is mainly that the constrained objects behave completely unexpectedly when you start adjusting after the Constraint is made. For instance, the world positions keyed, even if they are the same number, register a completely different position if you move the keyed W0 to different frames. Or all the issues that I have laid out above.

[stephenkmann]

Well, sure. 

the objects you've constrained to are probably not in the same place. 

so changing when you weight to the object , will be in  a different place