Hi Sybren, I suspected that there was a misunderstanding in terminology. I’m probably making confusion with the “Local” and “Global” coordinates system… I’m pretty confident that you are right and I have a misconception of what “relative to the parent” means, but I’ll try to explain my (probably wrong) idea with an example:
If the “local transform” is equivalent to the “transform relative to the parent”, for example, I would expect that entering a (0,0,0) position values in the position properties of the child object, would transform it to the origin of the parent In any case. But that’s not the case, unless the children and the parent aren’t in the same position at the moment of parenting:
I parent a Cube to an Empty, at the moment of parenting they both have a non-zero World position
If I don’t move the empty and enter (0,0,0) in the cube’s Location, it snaps to world’s origin:
In my mind, that’s World’s zero, not relative to Parent zero.
I would expect that entering (0,0,0) position in the position field of the Cube (that is supposed to be expressed in the Parent’s coordinate system), would put the Cube in the same position of the Parent, because in Parent’s space, the (0,0,0) coordinate represents the Parent’s origin (Again, at least in my mind).
Another example (In this case, this makes absolutely sense to me!):
Ok this is an analogy, we don’t have objects parented to other objects BUT…
Let’s pretend for a moment that vertices of a cube are actually objects parented to the cube’s origin. In edit mode we can see and manipulate the position of the vertices in Local and Global space, and they always make sense! No matter what, if I enter (0,0,0) while in Local mode, the selected vertex snap to the origin of the cube, if I enter (0,0,0) in Global mode, the selected vertex snaps to the World’s origin:
That makes totally sense! And that’s always the case, (afaik) and to me, that should be always the case with transformations of objects parented to other objects too! Not only with vertices positions!