How To Affect Only Location in Transformations

Transformations like grabbing, rotating and scaling are something you do on a daily basis. In a typical scenario you just select an object and do something to it, like move it to a different location, scale it or rotate it. These transformations affect the whole object.

Transformations Can Affect an Object…

For example, if you create a cube and move it, the whole cube will move. Or if you rotate the cube, the whole cube will be rotated. If you have more cubes and rotate them, you will see that the whole cubes are affected. And this is what you usually want, but, as you might have guessed, there are other possible scenarios as well.

… or Just Location

So, what if you only want to affect the locations of objects, not the objects themselves? Yes, you can do it. You can affect only the location in Blender. To demonstrate how it works, let’s first create some objects, for example by duplicating the default cube a couple of times. I’ll have three cubes altogether. If you are following along, move the cubes apart, just like in the picture below:

Now select all three cubes and move them as you always do, using the G hotkey. Then rotate them and scale. To do it you can use the R and S hotkeys respectively (just a reminder). As you can see, you are affecting the objects – the objects are moved, rotated and scaled.

With the cubes still selected open the Transform Options and check Location. You can find it in the Properties panel, which you can access by hitting N on your keyboard.

Now try moving, rotating and scaling again. This time moving works the same, but when you rotate and scale only the locations are affected. Now that you know how to use this technique, think of some use cases of your own.

Here’s the video version: