Maya- What is this Icon for?

pixeldamage

I'm trying to work out what this icon (from the Outliner) is for as a new maya user. Cant find its name so dont know what to search for on Google!

Icon in question:

Also question 2:

I dragged a mesh from a group with this icon into space (so it became its own entity in the hypergraph) and this action alone caused the mesh in question to jump to another location in 3dspace. I'm wondering what has happened? Why did it move? Some kind of control must have been implied by its location in the previous group but what?

MoP

It's a "locator" node.

DimitrisT

If you hover your mouse over any icon, text will come up describing it.

rooster

any parent transformations are passed on to the children, it sounds like the locator had transformations on it, and when you un-parented the object the parent transformation was removed

Firebert

rooster wrote: »

any parent transformations are passed on to the children, it sounds like the locator had transformations on it, and when you un-parented the object the parent transformation was removed

exactly

MoP

There's a setting in the "unparent" options (which is basically what you're doing here - unparenting a node) which tells it to preserve local transformations or not. This can prevent objects "jumping" when you move them - instead it just adjusts their relative transform values so they appear in the same place.

pixeldamage

Wow guys thank you so much! I know its such a simple thing but i'm a max user and trying to get up to speed for my new job (maya only) starting monday!

DimitrisT: unfotunately it doesn't show you what the icons in the outliner are hence why i asked here