To clarify what version I am working with at this time I will let you know from the start that it is Blender 2.63a. With that point made, I will now relate what I am trying to learn.

In a word, "Rigging". The educational document I am using The Blender Basics Tutorial is for 2.5, but it is only covering the basics. It has been quite helpful to me as far as the information it covers; however, though it indicates that origins (pivot points) can be moved in an object, it does not tell how to create a new origin for an object that has one already. Understand that the type of rigging I am trying to do is just pivot point rigging and not soft body rigging. The Blender Basics Tutorial shows that multiple objects can be jointed at specified pivot points by means of the child to parent relationship. Once the first and second objects are linked in this fashion, you choose the second object as the child of the third object, which becomes the parent of the second object, but the second oject is already parented to the first and does not have a pivot point at the end where I wish to Parent the third one to it. 

I want to create models that have opening doors, articulated sections and the like, which in Blender does not involve the creation of a skeletal system or weight mapping to smooth the deforming vertices during a posing operation. If I could do the work by that method rather than by pivot point rigging, the separate parts would have pivot points at each end of each bone. I could just join the different parts of my model to pivot around those ends. Weight mapping for hard body models is not a neccessity, so all I would need is the bones. That would be good except that from what I have seen so far, rigging with a skeleton system works on single object models, which is why weight mapping is a neccessity. It is called soft body rigging.

It would be highly appreciated if the good people here could help clarify the pivot point rigging method. Some questions I would like to know the answers to are as follows:

In the above example I pointed out that there is no pivot point at the other end of a parented object that already has a child. So this is my first question: When choosing it as the child for the next object to be parented to, does a new pivot point get created for that operation? If this is not the case, then how do I create the needed pivot point without deleting the original one for that object? Can a single object have more than one pivot point?

I tried joining two objects into one mesh with their pivot points at different ends, but once joined they only had one pivot point. This was not what I wanted.

I welcome any advice, suggestions or links to tutorials dealing with this subject. I have already found a few tutorials dealing with rigging but nearly all of them are for soft body rigging. As I am not yet to the point of creating soft body models this is of no help to me yet. Perhaps someday I will be able to do that type of work, but for now I will stick with hard body models.

Stay awesome!

Agent 0013.

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Someone said "If life serves you lemons, make lemonaid." I did that, but it still tasted sour! I guess I didn't add enough sugar!

ts