Maya 6 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide

Chapter 6. Grouping, Parenting, and Aligning

Grouping, parenting, and aligning provide ways of organizing and controlling an object’s relationship to other objects. If you wanted to move a number of objects around a scene simultaneously, you might want to consider grouping those objects so you could move them as a single unit—one selection vs. multiple selections.

You can think of parenting as a distant cousin to grouping. The difference between the two functions boils down to this: Parented surfaces (Figure 6.1) have a relationship in which one follows the other (Figure 6.2), while objects in a group can act both independently and as a single, grouped entity. We’ll be exploring the differences between parenting and grouping throughout this chapter. ...