Preserving children when irregularly scaling parent

Questions & Answers
1

I’m trying to modify the scale of a player at runtime, but not uniformly, e.g., edit his height but not width or breadth. Now I want his firearm to remain unchanged, but this isn’t happening.

To the player skeleton I added an empty “palm” gameobject to set the base firearm position, and the firearm model has an empty gameobject parent as a base with a uniform scale of 1. At runtime, the firearm base is parented to the palm object.

I am seeing two issues. One, the firearm does not appear to be preserving its scale when I set its parent, and two, more importantly, the firearm disintegrates and its different parts move in different ways.

Is there a way to solve this?

2

Use hand-coded fake parenting. Keep just an empty on the hand, where the gun should be, to let Unity track it for you. Don’t child the gun, to avoid inheriting a crazy scale. Instead, in Update:

gun.position = gunEmpty.position;
gun.rotation = gunEmpty.rotation;

The problem with real parenting and non-uniform scale+rotation isn’t that it’s buggy, but that it works properly. The gun distorted along those odd axis is the real math (scaling the player on world-Y scales the gun on world-Y.)

Then, if you want the gun to scale with the player, you can hand-scale the unchilded gun (which will use it’s local axises, and look good.)