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To begin, I had an empty as a parent of a bunch of objects (think books with many children). I wanted to duplicate this as a set so I followed the following instructions:

  1. Select Parent.
  2. Shift+G, Children.
  3. Shift select parent (by default it will be deselected when the children get selected).
  4. Alt+D to duplicate.

However, after duplicating many times, and translating and rotating the empties (think duplicating and positioning books on a bookcase), I realized that one of the children was hidden so it did not get duplicated.

enter image description here

So I'm looking for a good way to duplicate this child and reparent this to a new empty, applying the new transformations. As far as I know, there is no way to transform an object by parenting it. Whatever advice I am given here will not only help me fix my problem, but allow me to make use of this technique for new projects.

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The best solution I have found thus far:

  1. Select the child and its parent.
  2. Press Alt+D to duplicate linked.
  3. Manually copy the transform, rotation, and scale from the destination empty to the new empty.
  4. Select the new child.
  5. Press Alt+P > Clear [Parent] and Keep Transformation
  6. Parent it to the destination empty.
  7. Delete the duplicated empty.
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    $\begingroup$ maybe you should use Group Instances? you would not lose any of your items and it would cost much less memory as the new instances are images of the original object, not new objects $\endgroup$ – moonboots Jun 22 '18 at 6:29
  • $\begingroup$ @moonboots Great suggestion for when the materials are all the same. $\endgroup$ – dsamarin Jun 22 '18 at 21:03

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