• Godot Help2D

  • In the editor, can I move a parent node without moving the children?

I'm trying to put together a 2D skeleton in Godot's editor and am having trouble positioning things because every time I move a node, all of its children are affected too. In program like Blender, you can switch into an edit mode where it is possible to move node around without affecting the world space transforms of the children (ie, the local transforms of the children are updated so the world transform stays constant). Does Godot have a similar way to move parent nodes while leaving the children in place?

    I'm not sure that there is, but one trick I use when having this problem, is to move all the children out of the parent, then move the parent, then move the children back into the parent. But that won't be a very fun solution if you are doing it often.

    But this could be an editor feature request IMO

    kitfox I'm trying to put together a 2D skeleton in Godot's editor and am having trouble positioning things because every time I move a node, all of its children are affected too.

    Can't you assemble the skeleton starting with the root and then working down through the children, so that the problem doesn't occur?

        DaveTheCoder Not very efficiently. You're almost always going to need to need to reposition parent bones after positioning children. It's like drawing a picture. You're almost always going to need to clean up things after laying down your first lines.

          Did you try davek's method?

          Or you could try placing a Node, which has no position property, between the parent and the children. That seems to disconnect the child-moves-with-parent behavior. Then remove the Node from the chain after the adjustments. I don't know if that will solve your problem, but it's all I can think of.

            8 days later

            DaveTheCoder Davek's solution does help, but it is inconvenient to have to keep parenting and unparenting children. It would be nice to see Godot get the ability to move parents while children remain in place.