How do you Assign one object to another and what is the purpose of doing that?
I searched the net, Blender Manual and this forum for a few hours and came up blank.
When you search this forum for a 2 word combination, for example, “assign object” (in quotes), I expect results for “assign object”, but it doesn’t work that way. The results are for each individual word as if there were no quotes and you usually have to wade through about 500 results to try and find what you really searched for. I think this forum’s search function isn’t very useful because of this. Or, maybe there is a way which I don’t know about to search for “assign object”.
Might help to explain the source of what you’re trying to ask. There are a lot of assigns in blender, and depending on where you found the words the answer could be different.
You could be assigning a UV to an object, vertex groups to an object. You could be talking about one of the boxes that says Object: or Ob: which could be a view constraint, a point of reference for a modifier, etc.
Initially reading your post I was about to respond to parenting, but it doesn’t seem like that would be the answer as you weren’t searching for that word. Leaving the mouse over a box in blender usually brings up a tooltip that gives you an idea what the box is for.
I can’t off the top of my head think of where only the words “assign object” show up together and alone or in a menu, but I haven’t used every window so it may be something I haven’t used yet.
In the lamp settings is a button called layer. This sets it so the lamp only illuminates objects on the same layer as the lamp. You can use different layers to control what does and what does not receive the lamp light.