Contributed by Daniel Jircik.
Parenting is the heart and soul of object creation in blender. You can
get very elaborate in parenting schemes. But a brief explanation is as follows.
First select the object you want parented. IE under the control of another object.
Then hold the shift button and select the object you want to control the
first object. They both should be pink now. hit CTRL + P you are prompted
"Make parent" = yes.
Try this. open a new blender window which has
a default plane, and a camera. now ADD>EMPTY. Click on the default plane
and while holding the shift key select the empty. They both should be pink.
now as stated earlier hit CTRL + P prompt = yes. Now select the Empty and hit
the G key and you should be able to move the plane wherever you want..
Alternately you could hit the R key and rotate it . You can parent many objects
together in this way, and control their position etc with a single empty.
Soon you will realize you used to have a life, now you just want to be left alone to
blend into oblivion. Have fun.
Contributed by B@rt.
If you mean change the parenting hierchy during an animation: no, you can't.
Contributed by Irakli.
Parenting, (CTRL P), sets up a hierarchy of objects in blender.
This means that if you move a PARENT all objects under it will be transformed in the same way. If you want to move a CHILD then select the child indevidually, transform this, and its position, rotation etc will be changed RELATIVE TO THE PARENT.
Parenting is often used for animating characters, here the fingers would be children of the palm, which would be the child of the forarm, which would be parented to the upper arm, which would be parented to the chest. Assuming the chest is the centre of your character, then my moving only the chest, the limbs would follow it, rather than being left behind!
Contributed by B@rt.
While regular parenting links objects together, vertex parenting allows you to parent an object to a specific vertex or group of vertices of another object.
To create a vertex parent enter editmode of a mesh and select a vertex. Next, hold down CTRL and right-click on another object. It will turn pink. Press CTRL+P.
If you move the original object now, you'll notice that only the position of the vertex is passed onto it's child - NOT the orientation.
Another option for vertex parenting is to select three vertices of one face and parent another object to them. In this case, the orientation of the face will also be passed to the object. A cool example of why this would be useful is by using a _wave effect_ on the parent mesh - the child will dance on the waves.