Rigid body parenting

Unity Engine
1

So I have a sailing ship with 3 hulls. So ideally they should be under a parent. I made the parent a rigidbody with a mass/drag of 0, idea being that it should not contribute anything, it’s just there so I have a parent for the hulls. All 4 rigidbodies are connected via fixed joints. This appears to work ok.

The other approach is to not put a rigidbody on the parent, and then just sync it’s transform position and rotation with the rigidbodies. Seems uglier that way.

But what issues might I run into using the parenting approach? I can’t find any definitive answer in the unity docs on this specific case, parenting with fixed joints involved.

2

I think Ive read somewhere that parenting rigid bodies is fine as long as they have a joint between them. I know thats true for character joints and ragdolls anyway… not sure about fixed joints though. Are you ever planning to break the fixed joints? Like if the boat was damaged. I guess you might run into trouble in that case.