 Parenting in Blender is a fundamental part of the rigging process. But what is parenting? Well, parenting is when you form a parent-child relationship between two objects. And a parent-child relationship is when a child object inherits the transformations of a parent object. However, the child can still have its own local transformations in addition to the transformations inherited from the parent. It's kind of like how kids have to follow their parents when their parents move from one city to another. But once they're in the new city, the kids can still walk to school on their own. But why would we want to parent objects to another object? Oftentimes, parenting helps to more easily control the transformation and pivot points of a group of objects for the sake of animation. Some examples include parenting fingers to a hand, parenting objects or papers to the surface of a desk, or parenting leaves to a tree. Allow me to demonstrate. Let's take our cube, for example, and duplicate it with Shift D. Let's make this duplicate cube our parent object. Just for visual clarity sake, let's scale this cube up a bit so that we know for sure it's the parent cube. We can then select both cubes using Shift left click and then right click for a context menu. Go down to parent and select object. For hotkey users, you can press Ctrl P after you have selected your objects to access the same parenting menu. Let's go ahead and start moving, rotating and scaling our larger cube and the smaller cube should follow. However, it doesn't. Looks like we parented the wrong cube and accidentally made the smaller cube the parent cube. Since this isn't what we want, let's undo that with Ctrl Z. Now, why did this happen? Well, it's very important to make sure you select your intended parent object last. This will highlight the object in a slightly brighter yellow outline indicating that it is the active object. Once we've ensured that our active object is the one we want to parent our objects to, we can repeat the parent action again. Right click, go to parenting and select object. Now, we can move, rotate and scale our parent cube and as you can see, our child cube is following right along. An important note with parenting is that the pivot point of the child object is completely ignored when inheriting parent transformation. This includes instances where you select both the child and parent objects. However, transforming the child object still uses the child's local object origin. In fact, the child can still move around normally while parented. It will simply be influenced by the parent's transformations in addition to its own. A parent object can have multiple children objects, but child objects can only have one parent. For example, we can add a new cube to the scene by going to the add menu, going to mesh and selecting cube. This new cube does not currently have a parent, but we could parent it to the same large cube our other cube is parented to. This will give our larger cube two child cubes. Fun fact, if you want three child cubes, you can actually duplicate one of these cubes and it will still be parented to the same large cube. However, what if we introduce another parent cube? Let's say we duplicate the larger cube, so now we have two. I'm going to name this cube DaddyCube1 and this cube DaddyCube2. If we select our child cubes and then parent them to DaddyCube2, you'll notice that all relationship ties to DaddyCube1 have been cut. Transforming DaddyCube1 no longer affects the child cubes. Meanwhile, DaddyCube2 now affects the transformations of the child cubes instead. As you can see, each object can only have one parent, but parents can have multiple children. Additionally, we can also have a chain of parents. If we select DaddyCube2 and then select DaddyCube1, we can actually make DaddyCube1 the parent of DaddyCube2. This will also make DaddyCube1 the grandparent in a way of our three child cubes. This chain of parents can go on for as long as you like, but it can't form a loop. In other words, if you try to parent DaddyCube1 to any of its own children or grandchildren cubes, Blender will prevent you from doing so, as that will form a cyclic dependency, which is kind of like dividing by zero. This is the basic idea behind parenting, but it's important to know that it doesn't apply to only objects. Parenting works for bones and empties as well. Bones are what armature objects are made of, also known as rigs or skeletons. We'll go more into detail about bones in another video, but you can also parent things to empties. These are objects that contain little to no data except their own basic transformation data. They're invisible at render and are typically used for purposes of organization or reference. You can find them in the add menu and can parent them in exactly the same way we did before with our cubes. Parenting objects to empties is a common practice, as you'll be able to transform and deform multiple objects at once very easily if they're all parented to the same empty. My favorite example of this is when working with environments that contain multiple objects and props. By parenting all of the environment objects to an empty, you can transform the entire set very easily with one movement. As an added bonus, the empty itself does not appear at render time. This makes it even easier to manually control where the pivot point for your group of objects will be for transformation. Now, real quick, you may be wondering, how do we un-parent an object? Well, that's simple. Simply select the object or objects you would like to un-parent and right click for a context menu. Then go to parent, clear parent. For hotkey users, you can press ALT P to bring up the un-parenting menu. You might also be curious about what the clear and keep transformation option is for. This is used for cases where the object you're trying to un-parent has already inherited transformation from its parent for a while and you want to keep that transformation but removing the parent-child relationship actually removes that transformation entirely. So instead, you want to choose clear and keep transformation under the un-parenting menu. As you can see, despite being un-parented, the object has not moved from its previous location, rotation and scale. If you simply choose clear parent, it will clear all inherited transformation from the parent and return it to where it would have been if it was never parented at all.