I´m a Maya artist triying to switch to Blender and althought I´m really digging the software, I´ve falled into a problem when triying to understand grouping in Blender 2.91.
It seems that grouping has been recentrly changed to a “Collection workflow”, but this collections don´t have the hability to move their children around. And , as I´ve seen so far, the workflow for a traditional “Maya grouping” structure is making Empty Objects.
Now I have some new problem :
1-Changing an empty object´s pivot point (origin) without affecting children seems impossible
2-Can´t mirror such empty object because it dosen´t allow modifiers
3-When deleting an empty object, children remain in the scene but changing their position (they lose their parent´s transformation.
Am I approaching correctly object structuting in Blender ?
Traiying to learn Blender while modeling a character. For now I did a basic scultping and learned retopo workflows and some basic box modeling. But I´m struggling with outliner structure.
as you can see in the picture, mirroring parts in the face was no big deal using mirror modifier but as soon as I had to mirror the Knee pad I was unable to understand Blenders approach to grouping.
If you want to transform, or change the origin, on the parent only without affecting its children, there’s a transform option “Only Parents” (you can find it in the Options dropdown on the top right of the 3D view, or in the sidebar Tool tab, Options -> Transform). The same place where you’d find an option to affect only origins during a transform.
Indeed. Mirror is a geometry modifier. Yet it seems you wish to mirror whole objects, with their positions (origins). That’s not done with modifiers. That’s done, like in Maya, by duplicating the objects and transforming them. After duplication, the transform is either scaling with negative value, or using the convenience operators under the Object -> Mirror menu.
That said, it depends on your exact purpose. While you’re modeling, you can simply mirror the geometry of that knee piece using the Mirror modifier and specifying an object to mirror around in its settings (for example, you can specify the character’s body, or put an Empty in the world origin and mirror around that). I’m guessing you’re not quite familiar with that since Maya doesn’t offer this kind of workflow.
When you’re preparing a character for animation and want those pieces to be animated individually around their own origins - that’s when you’ll need to apply the modifier, separate the pieces and set up their origins, or remove the modifier, duplicate and transform.
Take note though that object mirroring results in negative scale on the mirror axis.
Yes. If you want to remove a parent but make its children keep the transform, you unfortunately have to go on a roundabout: select the parent, Select -> Grouped -> Immediate Children, Object -> Parent -> Clear Parent And Keep Transform. Then you can delete the former parent.
By “collections not having the ability to move their objects around”, I’m guessing you mean the Maya grouping where a group has its own transform node, thus implicit pivot. Indeed it’s not done quite the same way in Blender, and yes, if you want to be able to transform a chain of objects you need to parent them to something yourself.
in addition to what Stan has addressed the questions.
you can easily move things around collections by dragging them in outline or pressing “M” after selecting objects. even after moving around collections, they wont lose their connection to parent object.
most of the time empty object is better way to control all the object’s transforms.
but i rarely use this method, as for me just keeping them in collection without empty object.
selecting them all and using different Transform Pivot Points, it almost gives the same results meanwhile disabling selection for things i am not working on.
This workflow it´s a little ankward for me right now, but I supposed it´s a matter of getting used to. Groups with their transform and pivot it´s been my main way to organize my Maya scenes and is a bit strange for my leaving all at the outliner´s root. Hope I get used to it soon.
Thank you very much.
Model.025 glad you like it. It is going really slow coz modeling in a softw you are not used to is like swimming in mud. But I´m learning a lot.
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