Parenting objects which have a track contraint

When I parent an object which is tracking something, to something else, the child object moves or rotates, whereas it doesn’t do that when no track contraint is defined.

In this blend file, the middle cube tracks the right one. When you press ctrl-p, the middle one becomes the child of the left. It also jumps location. When you remove the track contraint first, and then parent, then all is fine.

In a landing gear rig I’m making, one particular object rotates when giving it a parent, whereas another moves so far away, it is outside the clipping distance of my edit view.

Is this normal behavior, or it is a bug? In any case, it’s kind of annoying, because it means I have to redo all the tracks of my landing gear in order to make all the parent relationships.

Isn’t it just jumping back to where it was before you added the Constraint? That’s what’s happening in your example blend. For these kind of things be sure to Ctrl-A on all seperate Objects and turn on the Axii display for each in F7 to keep it visual before doing any rigging or keyframing (constraints are part of rigging). Usually only necessary for Path objects Clear Origin (Ctrl-O) can also help.

Moving this to animation.

%<

Is that’s what happening in my example? The cubes are exactly where they are before tracking. And, when I ctrl-a, alt-r and alt-o every cube and then apply the parent, it still jumps.