Nodes

Let’s say we want a glowing sphere that always oscillates up and down on its y axis now matter where it goes: in 1 second it goes up a meter and in another second it goes down a meter, continuously. I can feed the sphere’s y position value a waveform signal that gets it to go up and down 1 meter. But what if i want to move that sphere all over the place as well, and have it keep going up and down off of that new relative position. If I bring the sphere up to 10 meters it should oscillate between 11 and 9 meters, not be forced by the signal to return to 1 and -1. ... hmm..

This is where nodes come in. A node set as a parent to our glowing sphere will take care of this. If we move the node up, sideways, anywhere, the child (our sphere) goes with it. And from that base position (the position to which we moved the parent node) our signal will tell the sphere to go a little bit relatively higher, up to 1 meter higher, and 1 meter lower, as the signal oscillates.

A node alone represents an empty entity, and empty object. It has a position and a rotation, and is one way used to create tight orderly collections of objects in the space; most often used as a parent to 1 or more other entities. A node can have parents (nodes parents of nodes parents of nodes parents of nodes…), siblings and/or children in the transform hierarchy.  

Reminder; a child to another node moves where its parent moves (position transform) and rotates when its parent rotates (rotation transform), and scales along with its parent (scale transform). It inherits its parent’s transform entirely and combines its personal transform to its parents transform (position/rotation it adds, and scale it multiplies). See the related articles below to see some valuable uses of nodes.

Here’s the absolute basics of how you work with nodes.

• Undock the Toolbox
• Select hierarchy in the upper listbox and node in the lower listbox.
• Create the node in the space
• Right-Click to Exit Draw Mode
• Undock the Hierarchy panel on the right
  • A)  Make a node a parent node to which other entities will be children
    • This will create a hierarchy, with the parent entity now having a child node
    • Click and Drag the Node in the Hierarchy panel onto another created entity
  • B)  Make the node a child of other entity in space
    • Click and drag the Node onto another created entity
      • This will create a hierarchy, with the parent entity now having a child node