Hi,
It’s relative to the Parent, NOT the Root.
To show you this, I have created a BP consisting of three components. A cube (root), a sphere and a cone.
Event Graph
Relative transforms. Cone transform relative to its parent (Sphere) and Sphere transform relative to its parent (Cube).
As you see, it gives the relative transform to the parent not to the root (unless parent is the root). One more thing to note is that relative transform for the root component, returns its world transform. Now if you want to find the relative transform of a component to the root, then you should get relative transform of that component and all its parents and sum their transforms (except for the scale, which you should multiply the child’s scale and all of its parents’ scale values) together. Note that this does not apply for rotation. since in rotations, rotators’ order matter.
Update:
There is a better way to get a component’s relative translation to the root component or any arbitrary parent on the chain up to the root (specially when the child has so many parents). You can simply subtract the child’s world translation from the root’s world translation or from any other arbitrary parent’s. The result would give the child’s relative translation to that specific parent whether it’s root or not. Note that this method won’t work for scale or rotation.
Regards,