Empties on chess pieces

[Richard_Rayer]

I am having trouble understanding the concept of using empties in this section of the course. I already have the pieces parented to the chess board. If I try to parent them to the empty, I will lose my chess board as the parent. I have included a jpg of my chess scene so far. I have made collections for the different things in my scene. Wouldn’t that be sufficient to organize the project?

Also, I am having trouble with my cutters for the Boolean modifier. When I duplicated a White Bishop and its Notch cutter for the Boolean Modifier to make the black bishop (Shift D duplication), and tried to parent it to an empty, the notch cutter jumped to the middle of the chess board. I thought I had ticked the “transform” box since the white Bishops are moving correctly.

Why keep the Boolean Modifier in this case? It has become a pain to control.

Any way, the picture of my chess board is above and I did make sure my chess board was turned around the correct way with the white square in the lower right of the chess board.

After viewing the rest of the lecture. I see how you intended to use the empties for the white and black pieces. I had included empties for the white and black pieces but I put them outside of the chess board behind the chess pieces. That would not be and effective place to have them for what you were intending to be their reason for being there. I had my board set up correctly so I didn’t need to rotate the pieces. However, that example showed me why and how empties can be used which is an important lesson.

[Capricas_Kirito]

I think the primary reason for adding the empties in this particular case is about managing the heirarchy structure. Using them for that purpose was a major part of keeping the heirarchy clean in older versions of Blender which didn’t have the “Collections” feature. I personally think that with the addition of Collections and d the changes to the Outliner Window, the Empties have been devalued as a heirarchy management tools.

As a parent obbect though, Empties remain an invaluable tool in the Blender Toolbox. The exact location of the empty is really not that important so long as it makes sense to you. For example, my preference would be to keep the empty centered on the edge behind the King and Queen – thus making it easy to identify which side the empty is controling. After all, the most powerful pivot point in Blender is the 3D Cursor.

[Marc_Carlyon]

Organisation and Control.

Those are the two primary take aways from this lecture.

With the collections its the organisation and control in a sense as you can right click the collections and select those in the collections.
But within those collections the emptys act as a sub organisation so you can move the white and black pieces independantly or with the board.
This helped massively when we discover that we need to rotate our chess pieces as a whole to position them correctly over the board using the two empties to pivot from. Yes we could have used 3d cursor as well in that example as a pivot but it saves having to worry about where it is located.

Its basically combining the new and the old ways in blender to create an new and (I’m sorry!) more “powerful” tool in blender