by RomanVolodin·Workflow
Images © RomanVolodin. Used for product review; image policy.
Dynamic Parent earns a spot for handling a fiddly manual task, animating Child Of constraints, through a small set of Create, Disable and Clear actions.
Dynamic Parent is an add-on for Blender by RomanVolodin that handles animated parent-child relationships between objects through the Child Of constraint. It lets you quickly enable and disable those relationships, and when a relationship is disabled the child's position relative to the parent is preserved.
The workflow runs from the selection: pick two objects with the child selected last, then click Create to add the constraints and animation keys. Move to another frame and click Disable to switch the constraints off for the selected objects. Because a constraint holds a single transform matrix, disabling calculates that matrix for the child, so a new constraint is created each time rather than reactivating an old one.
The Clear menu covers cleanup. Clear removes all DP constraints and their keyframes so you can start again, while Bake and Clear bakes object or bone animation before removing the DP constraints. The add-on requires Blender 5.0 or newer; earlier versions of Blender can use Dynamic Parent v2.0.2 or earlier. It is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later.
Dynamic Parent is best for blender animators working with parent-child relationships between objects through animated Child Of constraints.
Dynamic Parent is completely free to download and use.
Dynamic Parent version 2.1.0 requires Blender 5.0 or newer. If you are on Blender 4.x or an earlier release, the developer directs you to Dynamic Parent v2.0.2 or earlier, which supports those versions. For Blender 5.0 and up the add-on installs from the Blender Extensions platform, while the older builds are installed manually through Edit and Preferences. Check the developer's GitHub page for the specific download that matches your Blender version before installing.
Dynamic Parent does not support re-enabling a child constraint once it has been disabled. When you disable DP, Blender calculates the constraint's transform matrix for the child object, and since a constraint can hold only one matrix, the add-on creates a new constraint each time rather than switching an existing one back on. If you need to redo the relationship, you would create it again on the current selection. To remove existing DP constraints and keyframes entirely, the Clear menu lets you start from scratch.
Dynamic Parent installs differently depending on your Blender version. For Blender 5.0 and newer, install it from the Blender Extensions site. For Blender 4.x and older, download the latest add-on archive without unpacking it, launch Blender, open Edit then Preferences, click the Add-ons button in the left column, click Install at the top, select the downloaded archive in the window that opens, and tick the checkbox to activate the add-on. The developer's GitHub page links to both routes.
Dynamic Parent is listed here as free and is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. That license covers how you can use, modify and redistribute the add-on. For the current licensing terms and the latest release, check the developer's GitHub page for details. The add-on also states that it requires no special permissions to run in Blender.
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