How To Parent Objects in Outliner

Before we dive into our topic and see how to parent objects in Blender, let’s just take a short break and think why we even may want to parent objects in Blender.

Imagine that you’re working on a complex project of a car. You model the body of the car, then the wheels and maybe something else, depending on how complex your project is. You want the wheels to be separate objects because you may want to be able to animate them independently of the other parts of the car. This is why joining all the parts into one big mesh is not a good solution here. This is actually a typical example when parenting comes in handy. When parented, you will be able to transform just the parent and all its children will move, scale and rotate along. But if you want to work on just one of the children, you can still do it.

How To Actually Parent Objects in the Outliner

In order to demonstrate how to parent objects in Blender, we’ll need some objects. Open a new Blender file and leave the default cube there. Then create a UV sphere, move it aside and duplicate a couple times. I’ll have four spheres altogether.

Now, if you want to parent the spheres to the cube directly in the 3D Viewport, you can select the spheres and as last the object you want to parent them to, so in our case the cube. You can use the Ctrl+P shortcut. Check it out and then undo the parenting.

Alternatively you can use the Object -> Parent menu. Try it out now and then also undo the parenting.

Now, in the 2.8 version of Blender it’s also very easy to parent objects directly in the Outliner. Just select the spheres and then holding down the Shift key drag them onto the cube object. You can see in the Outliner that now the spheres are parented to the cube.