3D Glossary--Parenting

Parenting

Parenting is the process of creating a hierarchical organization of objects in a SCENE.

In parenting, an object (called the parent object) is "parented" to another object (called the child object). Parenting relationships can be nested to any degree, so that one or more objects are the children of another object, which is in turn the child of another.

Transformations of the parent object affect all child objects (sometimes called "descendants") as well. The effect is to allow separately modeled objects to be used in a scene as a single functional unit. For example, the chest of a human character may be made the parent of the two arms. In this manner, the arms will stay connected to the chest as the chest is rotated or translated. Likewise, the arms will be scaled up and down as the chest is resized. The arms, however, as child objects, can be transformed without affecting the chest.

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