Parents and Children By

I  n  t  r  o  d  u  c  t  i  o  n

This tutorial require you to know how to organize Blender windows and how to model basic objects.

If you have already used a 3D software other than Blender, you will surely seek a 'group' function. Here it is. Within Blender this is called 'parenting' (an action consisting in making a link 'child->parent' between two or more objects). Easy to understand at first, this kind of family hierarchy can become real challenging when dealing with complex groups of objects, unless you make sure to follow a few elementary rules since the beginning :

The first rule consist in opening a view on the 'datas blocks' (SHIFT+F9) and to reorder them a bit. Data appear in these blocks unsorted. You can move the 'blocks' the same way as you move common objects ((Right click in order to select, and G-KEY to grab and move it).

The second rule consist in naming in an explicit way each object in the task bar from the Edit buttons (F9-KEY). When you don't respect this simple rule, you'll find painful when you'll try to guess if 'plan.088' is the floor of your virtual living-room or the ceiling of the kitchen.

The left case is used for the name of the object, the right case names the 'data-block' linked to the object (the data-bloc is beyond the scope of this tutorial ; translator note : UN = ONE in french).

For the first part of this tutorial, just model any three objects in any 3D view. Then open the 'data-blocks' and sort the blocks in order to get something close to the following (brown rectangles are affiliated to 'datas-blocks', grey ones to the objects). Don't display materials or textures, it will crowd needlessly the views.