Originally posted by Kyle Sloane
But that's the thing. Each of a ferris wheels cars have their origins at the axis that they rotate, not at the center.While having the origins all around the rim works when exporting from lightwave, it doesn't for blender. If I apply the location, it sets the origin to the center, and I cannot set each chair to rotate along their individual axes.. If there is some work around to animating the chairs to follow the rim of the wheel and rotate independently that would be great.
I'm not an expert in Blender by any means, so maybe there's still a way to do this. But as far as I can tell, what you're trying to do with Blender objects isn't possible.
As I understand it, Blender does not differentiate between each object's local coordinate system and the scene's coordinate system. The object origin is a pseudo-origin of some kind that has relevance only in Blender. So you can never have an object with its own origin relative to the world's origin.
You can still build the Ferris Wheel using Blender. And you should still set the car's origins at the point of rotation. But you will not get the position on the wheel for "free". Instead you will have to hard code the position of each of the cars in the script.