8

1046 Glossary
Child—
An object controlled by its parent. A child
object can also be a parent to other children. An
objectthatdoesn’thaveanyparentisbydefaulta
child of the world. (The "world" is an imag inary
object that acts as the root of all other objects in
the scene.)
Ancestors—The parent and all of the parent’s
parents of a child object.
Descendents—The children and all of the children’s
children of a parent object.
Hier archy—The collection of all parents and
children linked together in a single struc ture.
Root —Thesingleparentobjectthatissuperiorto
all other objects in the hierarchy. All other objects
are descendents of the root object.
Subtr ee—All of the descendents of a selected
parent.
Branch—A path through the hierarchy from a
parent to a single descendent.
Lea f —A child object that has no children of its
own. The lowest object in a branch.
Link —The invisible connection between a parent
and its child. The link is a conduit for transmitting
position, rotation, and scale info rmation from
parent to child.
Pivot—Defines the local center and coordinate
system for each object. You can think of links as
connecting the pivot of a child object to the pivot
of its parent.
Home Grid
Using the home grid to po sition houses
Grids are two-dimensional arrays of lines similar
tographpaper,exceptthatyoucanadjustthe
spacing and other features of the g rid to the needs
of y our work.
Grids have these pr imary uses:
• As an aid in visualizing space, scale, and
distance
• As a construction plane where you create and
align objects in your scene
• As a reference system for using snap
The home grid is the basic reference system,
defined by three fixed planes on the world
coordinate axes. The home grid is visible by
defaultwhenyoustartthesoftware,butcan
beturnedoffwithanoptionintheright-click
viewport menu. You can use any view of the home
grid as a construction plane or you can create
a
grid object (page 3–1045) and use that as a
construction plane instead.