Subtitles of the Movie

The more complex your animations become, the more models you add to your scene, the more you will rely on parent-child relationships, or hierarchies. Let's set up a simple hierarchy. Bare bones you need two models, a parent and a child. The models can be anywhere on 3D space; they don't have to be next to each other. To link one object to another, or make a model a child of another, you can select the child model Ð let's select this green gear Ð and then click on this tool in the Tool Palette. This is the Parent Tool. The tool looks like a chain link because you are linking one object to another. Click on that and then an alert appears instructing you to select the parent. I'm going to pick the Orange Gear from the Project List. Now you can see the child object indented and underneath the parent, just like an outline in a page layout program. You can select the third object and parent it to the child. Now you have another indent. So, children can be parents of other children. The order of the hierarchy is determined by the indents seen in the Project Window. You can also re-parent an already parented object by clicking the Parent Tool again and selecting another object. Let's select the Orange Gear. Now, the original parent has two children instead of a child and a grandchild. You can break this hierarchy at any time by selecting the objects and then clicking the Orphan Tool in the Tool Palette. If you look closely at the Project Window you'll see at the top, above the Timeline, some of the same tools you'll find in the Tool Bar. They work the same way. Click the Parent Tool and select the new parent. I'm going to delete the third Gear so we can concentrate on how a basic parent-child relationship works. I'm going to rename our models by clicking once on each and typing in the Name field in the Project Window. So one is named Parent, and then the other is named Child. Our two Gears are in different positions in 3D space. Let's look at each gear's Info Window. The Parent's Gear Position is at the Origin, or zero, zero, zero. Now, look at the Child Info. The Child also appears to be at the Origin, but as we can see, it is not. Let's Orphan the Child. Click the Orphan Tool and now we can see its true Position data. It's Exposition value says 200 units. Let's re-link to the Parent Ð again, the Parent Tool, select the Parent. The Exposition value again says zero. I'll move the Parent and take another look at the Child Info. Select the Parent, use the Translate Tool, and I'll move it along the X-axis and then select the Child. But the Position data still says zero, zero, zero for the Child. What's going on here? Clearly the Child object is moving because its Parent is moving, but the Child has not moved in relation to its Parent. A child's Position, Rotation, and Scale all show default values when it is parented, so any change in these attributes are actually describing an offset from its parent's values. Let's undo. So, if the Parent's Position was set at 100 units along the X-axis, and then I Orphan the Child, the X's Position data now shows 300, as expected.