Messed up my project

[Dorhero]

I’m not sure how to fix this. I did the exercise before listening to the explanation and I decided I would apply location, scale, and rotation to the base, after having parented the board to the base.

Then I continued working on my base, did some scaling, etc.

After I turned back on my pieces, this is what I got. All the pieces are scaled drastically (presumably when the base was scaled???).

I had saved multiple times (as suggested). Gazillions of undos didn’t fix it, nor did revert.

Is there any fix for this or do I need to start the whole scene over again?

[FedPete]

Did you scale the parent empty only on the z-ax?

• Check the scale of your objects and empties …
• Try to delete the parent empty(ies).

[NP5]

Very odd one. As they are all stretched it does suggest something that is influencing them all like an empty that has been scaled in Z. Try selecting whatever parent empties control everything, and scaling in Z to see if it alters the pieces as required. It might mess up the board, so just experiment deparenting or deleting empties that are parents may also work.

[Dorhero]

That sounds right. I’ll try it out.

[Dorhero]

I’ll probably try this first. I assume, after reading your responses, that I scaled the empties that were children of children of children. And I did, in fact, have an empty for every piece, including individual pawns, that were in the parent/child lineage.

Thank you, both of you, for helping me out. Hopefully, I come out of this a better modeler, though I don’t quite understand how scaling an object scales its children. I’ll have to experiment.

[FedPete]

The usage of empties in this chessboard challenge, is not a really good practical example! It’s just a way to learn implementing empties and parenting them.

Nowadays you would use collections, to group pieces.

[Dorhero]

I experimented a lot with just basic shapes and empties. If you have a parent child relationship for several generations, with any objects, including empties, transforms made to the parent are taken up by the child for x generations.

This was my problem. I thought I was being smart setting up a hierarchy so I could move everything if I moved their parent(s). I didn’t really think about how scale impacted my objects.

That was an excellent learning experience.