How To Affect Only the Parent in Blender

Parenting is one of the things you do a lot in Blender on a regular basis. You parent objects which belong together in a hierarchical way so that you don’t have to handle each tiny part of them separately, but rather the whole object as an entity. On the other hand, parenting still allows you to use each of those tiny part independently, so you have a lot of different options. Anyway, sometimes you may want to affect only the parent in Blender. This is the case in transformations.

To make things clear, let’s first have a look at how parenting works the traditional way and then how it can be used so that only the parent is affected.

Parenting the Regular Way

So, if you parent some objects to another object and then transform the parent object, the transformations also affect the children. To visualize this let’s create a similar setup as in the previous video with three cubes. Let’s parent the two duplicates to the original cube, which you can now do by holding Shift and dragging in the Outliner.

If you’re following along, your setup should look more or less like in the picture above.

Now select the parent cube and apply the three transformations to it one by one. As you move, rotate or scale the parent, the same happens to the children. This is the behavior you are used to and you expect.

Affecting Only the Parent in Blender

You can change this behavior, however, so that the transformations apply only to the parent. To do so, check the Parents box in the Transform Options. You can access it by hitting N on your keyboard. Now apply the three transformations again and the children will not be affected. If you then uncheck the box, things will get back to normal. This is how you can affect only the parent in Blender.

Here’s the video version: