Help! Why do objects move when you parent them??

(Larryboy) #1

I’m sure this is a stupid question but its been plaguing me for sometime and I think I am missing some fundimental understanding of Blender.

When you create an object and you move it or rotate it etc, that is measured from the global origin. From what I’ve read it’s good to do an Alt R and Alt G to clear rotation and translation before parenting to an armature. But that puts them back in the middle.

Often when I parent my object to an armature the object flips though 90 degrees in an axis reletive to the armature. It still seems to work but looks a little stupid.

Also I find that objects that have been moved behave very strangely in the games engine (where I’m doing most of my work.)

That doesn’t sound to clear but I only see symtoms of my misunderstanding. Please can someone take the time to point me in the right direction as I haven’t found anything in the posts yet.

Thanks Larry:o

(Fligh) #2

From what I’ve read it’s good to do an Alt R and Alt G to clear rotation and translation before parenting to an armature

Wherever you heard that, it’s wrong; Alt-G/R/S resets to the Initial Translation Point. What you’re looking for is Ctrl-A which removes any prior Translations (except Location) and Initializes all current translation as default (hit N before doing it and see what happens in the Transform Properties tab).
Parenting (Alt-P) in an Object to Object heirarchy takes the Object Center and therefor (unless cleared with Alt-O) the Origins of both objects as refrence points. Shft-Ctrl-P takes only the Object Center of the Parent as ref. The spacial and rotatational relationships, depending on what type of object is Parent and what is Child, can also be affected (or determined) by Axis Orientation (what View you added it in) and therefor the Track and Up coordinates in F7.

%<

(AndyD) #3

What you’re looking for is Alt-A which removes any prior Translations (except Location)

Actually, that’s CTRL-A to apply transformations. Alt-A plays an animation.

As for the rotation misalignment, Fligh pretty much summed that up - you most likely added the armature or mesh in front view instead of top view, so it is immediately misaligned with the global axes. Generally it is best to add “everything” in top view, then rotate it to how you want it (generally). One other thing that you start to learn is that sometimes it’s best to perform rotations in edit mode rather than object mode so that the mesh itself is exactly how you want it and there’s no need to rotate the “object” then apply that transformation.

(Fligh) #4

Damn, thanks Andy.

%<

(Larryboy) #5

Many thanks for your replies…
I haven’t got it in my head yet but I will stare at it tonight…
Seems there are dark depths in Blender…:spin: