A parent child hierarchy is used in many different applications and forms in the software that we use. Essentially it is used to manipulate objects to conform to another object. In other words, the child of a parent object will inherit the properties of the parent object. As such, in Maya we can use this to great effect to help our workflow when it comes to modelling and animating.
The outliner shows the structure of the hierarchy. In this example, my sphere is my body and the arms and legs are the child of the sphere. The arms and legs are also parents to child objects. Because of this, If I was to rotate the shoulder, the arm and hand would follow that same rotation. If I was to rotate the arm, the shoulder wouldn’t rotate as it is a parent to the arm. The hand would follow the arm as the arm is the parent to the hand.
In my animated short project, the only thing I need to rig is my pizza box and that is already done. All I done was move the pivot point of the pizza box lid to the edge so that it can now flap open. I will follow up this post with a gif showcasing this.
JORDAN | GLITCH ARCADE 