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 unitone 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.

Figure 6.1. Multiple parented surfaces are shown in the Hypergraph.

Figure 6.2. When a parent joint is moved, all of the children move along with it.

Aligning objects, surfaces, and curves can be tricky if you're trying to do it by sight alone. Luckily, Maya offers a few tools to help, including the Align and Snap Together tools.