Chapter 6. Grouping, Parenting, and Aligning

Grouping, parenting, and aligning provide ways of organizing and controlling an object's relationship to other objects. Because construction in Maya almost always consists of multiple objects, it's crucial to have ways to organize, move, and distribute these objects.

Grouping objects is a commonly used organizational and hierarchical tool. Grouping works by gathering individual objects into a set, which you can then move around or duplicate as a whole. In addition, grouped objects provide organization for your scene by creating a common namespace or folder-like structure.

Parenting is similar to grouping, but with a fundamental difference: Parented surfaces (Figure 6.1) have a relationship in which one follows the other (Figure 6.2), whereas objects in a group can act both independently and as a single, grouped entity. Parenting is used for control structures such as bones.

Figure 6.1. Multiple parented surfaces (known as a hierarchy, or chain) are shown in the Hypergraph.

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

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