Layout Parent to Object

    This plug-in is a motion plug-in, and can be found in the Graph Editor window, under the Motion Plug-ins button.  You may have noticed that there's a limitation with LightWave's bones - it's impossible to parent them to objects.  However, once in a while it's necessary to have bones match the motion of a regular object.  For example, say you have a segmented character that is covered in slime.  You'll want to deform the slime with bones, but your character is segmented (and a separate object anyhow).  What to do?  Use this plug-in to parent the bones in the slime to your objects.
    There's only one control for this plug-in, and that's the object to parent to.  Simply select an object, and the parenting will be taken care of.  Now, I must mention that the way this plug-in works may be slightly confusing at first.  Because of the way a LightWave item motion plug-in works, there is no way to set the world position of an item (in this case, a bone) from a plug-in.  So, the item's position is added to the world position of its parent.  The reason I chose to use this method is that if your parent object is part of a hierarchy (which is quite likely), its position won't be of much use.  Other than that, rotation and scaling are handled like you'd expect.

Tutorial
    To demonstrate how you might use this plug-in to parent a bone to an object, here's a quick tutorial.  We'll use this plug-in to make a brick automatically deform a pillow.  If you have LightWave 5.5, you can click on any of the following links to load up the object or scene they point to.

1. To begin, open Layout and load brick.lwo and pillow.lwo.
2. Position brick.lwo so that it just rests on top of pillow.lwo.
3. Add a bone to pillow.lwo that's the same length as the brick.  (Use the top view for reference to set the rest length.)
4. Go into the Graph Editor for the bone, click on the Motion Plug-ins button, and then activate RealiTools_ParentObject.
5. Click Options, and select brick.lwo from the drop-down list.  Then click OK, and close the graph editor.
6. Press r to activate the bone.  Press p to open its settings panel.
7. Turn on Limited Range, then set Minimum Range to 20 cm, and Maximum Range to 50 cm.  Close the settings panel.
8. Now, set a keyframe for brick.lwo at frame 20, moving it down into the pillow somewhat.

When you're done, your scene should look something like this scene.