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  • Published 6 Mar 2020

Have children move with parents by default (or with a preferences option)

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2.8/2.81's changes has brought Blender closer to most 3D application standards with regards to the outliner, but one behavior that consistently gives me trouble is that objects that are parented do not move together in the outliner. I would expect children to move with parents, but as you can see from the above example as of 2.82 the current behavior is that if you move a parent, children remain in their current collection. For complicated scenes this quickly becomes a mess as you try to keep things organized. I propose that by default children move with parents from collection to collection or at least that there be a checkbox in preferences that would allow for this behavior.

parenting_move2.gif

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Development Status: Open

Upvote 43 Downvote 3
dreamparacite
6 Mar 2020

10 Comments

3rton

This seems like it'd be the better choice 80% of the time so has my vote However, it should be noted far as I've understood the viewlayer collections are primarily about visibility/renderability so it isn't always relevant for parents and children to be in the same collection (for example the actual meshes and control objects) For now, though, if you switch from 'Viewlayer' to 'Scene' in the outliner type you can see all your objects hierarchically

5
hadriscus

* @3rton93 * agreed, from a rigging or scene assembly point of view this doesn't seem desirable at all, which is what I meant by my previous comment. I understand the confusion between object hierarchy and collection hierarchy, but they are different things, for different purposes. However, I've had projects where object hierarchy and collection hierarchy were very close, if not identical in cases, so I'm sensible to the cause. I suggest the "move to collection" operator be added an optional property "bring children along".

Darknoodles

Maybe by holding a key while dragging. Something like Alt (as it is already used in other field to affect every object selected when changing a value)

2
sommerper

Completely agree. That would be the next logical step in the todo.

2
ckohl_art

That should definitely be the way things work by default.

1
dreamparacite Author

UPDATE: I'll admit I was not familiar with the view layers workflow prior to making this post, and having utilized compositing I can see the benefit of having the current workflow.

Still, I can see how it can confuse new users and those like myself who weren't familiar with what a view layer is and are simply trying to use collections to organize their scenes.

ad.morris

I think the current behaviour is by design for the collections system. You can do what you need by using right click > select hierarchy then hitting M and moving the whole selection to a different collection though. Holding an operator like ALT or something to do this would be handy though, similar to how shift + drag and drop parents objects inside a collection.

peter.boos

I recently imported a DAE from from freecad, it had subobjects nested in main object (no parent, but the mesh icon had sub icons asuming more is possilbe here) Riged figures can have this too, is this maybe what you would want

MassimoMoneta

By Default, no doubt.

hadriscus

I don't see why there should be such an implicit side-effect to parenting ?