How do I access local translations of child objects?

Support Basics & Interface
1

I have a lot of experience using Maya and Lightwave. In those programs, if I have the folllowing scene;

An empty/null/locator at 2,2,2 (xyz)

An object at 5,5,5

If make the object a child of the empty, the translations of the object will change to 3,3,3 and if I zero these out, the object will snap to the empty.

It doesn’t seem to work this way in Blender. Child objects have their global world position in the Numeric panel so in the example above, the translations for the object would read 5,5,5 despite the object only being 3 units away from the parent empty. There must be a way of seeing the local transforms of an object [once it’s part of a hierachy]?

Can anybody shed any light?

2

I’m not seeing a way to do that either, but if you want the parent to be at the same location as the child you can do this.

  1. Select object, Shift+S (choose cursor to object)
  2. Select Parent, Shift +S (choose selection to cursor)

Not sure if this is what you’re looking for.

3

Thanks for the reply. Yeah I can move the children around but it’s a few more key presses than being able to zero out the x,y,z of the local transforms of a child.

The reason this issue came up is that I’ve converted one of my old, half-finished projects from Lightwave to Blender. It’s a complex vehicle with lots of pieces that need positioning in a hierarchy. I’ve been placing empties around the vehicle to use as rotational parents and then parenting child objects to the empties. I was hoping the child objects would snap into the correct place when I zero out their transforms but annoyingly, they go to the centre of the world.

It’s not a show stopper but I’m surprised the local transforms of child objects aren’t available.

4

Try this, see if it does what you want.
Select both objects, the either go to the menu . Object>Make Local>Selected Objects

Or press L, then 1

in my test the child was now referenced to the parent in the transform properties box.

5

Sorry for the late reply Florida.Jo . Yes your answer works and was what I was looking for.
I was just a bit surprised it was a specific command rather than being de facto behaviour.

But it’s all good now. Thanks for helping me.

6

Good, glad to help out.