C4D Tools: The Axis Center Tool

[Music] hey guys it's Sam for digital meat and in this cinema4d video I want to talk about the access center tool so let's just get straight to it I'm gonna create a box I'm gonna make sure it's on the floor if you're wondering what the button is up here that I just pressed that's plugging could drop to floor I've already made a video about that and I'm just going to create a kind of pseudo door shape something like this okay cool and I'm gonna make this editable now some of you when you want to move your axis you probably click on this tool here this is the enable access tool and it means that you can move the act axis independent of the object itself and you might go into your top view I mean say this you know you want this to be a door you're obviously gonna want to hinge at one side so probably going to your top view something like this grab this put it near your edge zoom in further and try and line it up like that maybe put it in one of the corners because that's where the hinge of it's going to be obviously this is a super simple model in fact we might make it more complicated in a minute and you keep zooming in until you get it you know as close as you can and now when you are come out of this tool here you will have something that rotates around now with more complex objects obviously this is going to be a bit of a pain in the arse and so I'm just going to move this back to its original position and that's where the center axis tool comes in it is super super useful for lots and lots of different things and we're gonna go through a few of those things now so you can find this tool if you go to mesh and then down to axis and then here you'll have axis center then you've got Center axis two central objects all of this stuff here but all of these are actually contained within this axis center and it'll when you click on it it'll open it up this dialog let's reset that so it's back to its default settings now I use this tool so much that I've actually docked it up here and if you don't have to do that you can go to window customization and customize command and then you can type in access center and it will find this here and then you can just drag this out and put it in your layout here as you can see I've got two there now because I I've actually already got it in my saved start up layouts Alessa I just reload that and there we go I've got the save start up layout okay with that button here now then I can press this and I can just put our dialogue up here just out of the way and we're gonna go through this and sort of explain what each of these means now first of all we got this so little check box here Concentra and basically this needs to be activated if you want to be able to move the axis if you turn this off obviously you can see this is all grayed out now how's it be confused by this at the beginning because it's could the axis Center tool so why would I need this little checkbox it's obvious that I want to move my axis so you know what is the point of this but it's because you can also align stuff as well so if you want to align your access without moving it moving its position you can turn this off and obviously turn this on so that's that's why okay so let's go you through a few of these options here then so to start off with I'm actually going to leave these drop downs here set to access to and all points and we can go over a few of these sliders here so access to it basically means that the object axis will be moved okay and center all points so you can actually send her to all of the points of the object or you can send it to selected point selected polygons selected edges which is super useful and the action access to object to view Center and all the rest of it will go through that in a second but if I wanted to move this access so let's get the top view and frame that zoom out slightly so we want to say our hinges over here somewhere we can move it along the X and you can see the X there along the X axes and if I go - hundred percent it will move it all the way to this edge is extremities and if we zoom right in we can see there is perfectly on that edge and we haven't had to go into this like we did before and faff around it's just done it and we can also do this in the Z direction as well so if we bring the Z all the way down and press execute it will be right on this corner now and now we're able to rotate around that point right on the edge there so that's what these sliders do let's reset if you hit reset you got you got execute here which will execute whatever options you got set and you've got the reset button so if you hit reset everything will go back to the default settings and if I hit execute now the axis will be at the center of all points in the center of the object because the these are all at 0% okay let's go through a few of these options then so let's get back to our perspective view so we've got access axis to even and we've got object to so if I go to object two and then change the X instead of moving the axis all the way to the extremities of in the minus X it will move the object instead so if I press execute now the axis is on the extremities of minus X of the object but instead of moving the access to that to the extremities of the object is moved the object so the access is on the extremities so if we go back and hit it again you can see the objects being moved so that might be what you want you want might when your access to remain on 0 or wherever and that applies in all directions so I'll move the object instead of the axes itself that's all that means so let's go back we've got view sent ah I can't really think of a good reason to use this but um you know I'm sure there's some of you out there that might have a use for this but if you have our view like this and I hit this you can notice now that all of these um the XYZ has been greyed out and it's because it's not gonna be used in this calculation is purely based on the viewport view so if I go here and execute it's gonna move the object and it's access to the middle of the view and if I go over here and hit it bang and it will keep going that actually might be helpful if you've created a large scene and you're working on you know section over here you create a new object it creates a world 0 but you want it where your view is you can just view Center and execute and it will bring it to you and then you can work with it there I suppose that's a good use case for that then we have a couple of options for parent to and to parents let's go parent to so let's create a parent for this I'm just going to make a sphere so we can differentiate our objects in fact I'm going to take our cube back to world 0 as well and I'm just going to hit s so we're back there and also I'm going to make our cube sit on the floor again and let's grab our sphere and size this down slightly unless make our sphere a child of the cube okay and I'm gonna make this editor below as well and we're gonna go to parent - so what parent - actually does is brings the access of our parent object to our selected object so I've got the sphere selected and it's a child of the cube and if I execute it brings the door to that object and you can do the reverse of that which is - parent so my selected selected object the sphere you'll now go to the pier of the parent and that's what that means in these modes as well you'll notice something different if I go back to access - you'll see that these position rotation and scale are greyed out but when I'm at so if I go to parent - or to parent it will give us the option of would you like to carry across the position and the rotation or the scale of those objects this is quite handy because you may have a case where you want to move this object to the position of the pivot of this door but you don't want to bring the rotation so if I take this sphere out the cube for a moment and then rotate this cube something dodgy like this and then put the sphere back in and also let's move this sphere away so it makes it more obvious and I have position and rotation turned on and execute in fact we want not parent to two parents and we'll bring the sphere to the parent and we'll execute it also rotates the sphere as well so the position and rotation has been checked on there but if I did want to bring this sphere to the pivots location but not its rotation I can check that off and move it accordingly but without rotating the object okay let's get back to access - this is the one that I use the most to be honest let's reset those options as well for the sake of argument I'm going to let's just delete those two things I'm going to create another cube nice and quick and make another door type shape make this editable okay next we're going to have a look at this Center drop down and at the moment is set to all points so if I hit execute nothing's going to happen because this access is already in the center of all of the points of our object the only thing that will tweak that is obviously these sliders that kind of overrides this at least in this axis anyway so let's reset that get it back in the middle but we've got some other options down here and we've got selected points so if I go into my point tool and actually select these two points up here and then go back to our object so you don't have to you could remain in point points mode and hit execute and it do the same thing but I'm gonna go back to objects just so you can see that it moves our axis in relation to the points we've selected so let's go down and say selected points we know that we've got these two selected if we go back into point mode now you see they're selected so let's here execute and now our axis is in the center of those two points you could even pick one point if you wanted the axis center to be on an individual point you can do that as well this also works for other things like selected poly so if I went into polygon mode and selected this poly on the edge here and you can see the center of that poly is coming up and if we go back to the object access and here execute we can see that that's there the same applies to edge as well so if we select edge you can select this edge go back to this so we can see hit execute and it moves to this excellent okay so that covers both of these dropdowns and what they do I'm now get this back to all points I'm also gonna make sure that you haven't got anything selected in our points and edges and polygons and let's get this back to the middle okay let's let's make this a little bit more complicated I'm gonna create a cylinder I'm gonna shrink down its size and adjust its height as well we don't need that many height segments and we certainly don't need that many rotational let's bring this down to 12 or something like that and we can we can size this something like this and we can put this on the side and we're actually going to UM we're gonna make this one object so that's connect objects and delete and now we've got one object and this is a door and this is our hinge it's a horrible horrible model but it will serve as a good example for us so we would obviously want our hinge to be in the middle of this here so what we can do is select our object and if we obviously just you know hit that it's gonna evaluate all the points in our object and you'll see there it's offset slightly because it's taken these points into account but like I said we want them over here now obviously scooching this along to over here is not gonna be good because it's gonna be on the outer extremities I suppose what you could do is keep tweaking this until you get the desired result but you're gonna be playing a hit-and-miss game by doing by doing that so what we could do I didn't mean to do that this frame default what we could do is actually use our points so we can say selected points grab that one smack bang in the middle and then grab this one here as well and then we can execute that and now when we go back to our model axis it'll should be smack bang in the middle of that hinge and we can now rotate everything around that hinge so that's a good use case for why I was talking about and this is super useful if you need your doors you know if your doors gonna be opening and shutting I I use this tool a lot because I explore quite a lot to unity so if I had a door that was actually a rigidbody that you can open and close you'd need your pivots to be in the correct places obviously and same with animation or anything like that so that's a good use case for that so let's move on to alignment and less less mess this up a little bit so with our door let's let's actually change its orientation like this to something really you know it's not aligned with the world in any way and what we do is we'll set will set everything back to the middle again and in fact let's turn on alignment and align everything with the world as well so you might be in a situation in fact would that reset actually doesn't reset the world stuff there I wonder maybe you can't this name return to default but you might get a model that comes in and you know it may be cared it may be something dodgy and it comes in like this so what you'd want to do is actually not only move the access to where you want it to be but you'd want to include alignment so that's um let's do this in two parts so if I go to my points and do what I did before we can say selected points we can go grab that point there and this point here and we can now execute this and now in our model mode we should be at the right place but the problem we have now is that it's not aligned correctly with this so let's do with the alignment separately and turn off the center checkbox so now it's in the right place we don't want the access to be moved we don't really put position to be changed at all we just worried about the alignment so in this mode it's all and the options you've got you know X Y Z but we're gonna leave it all and the alignment is normals so let's just execute that and see what happens and also make sure that we're in our local axis in the coordinate system which we are now that didn't do too much help there so what we can do is a selected edge or world so I'm gonna go for the selected edge and we can actually just select one of these edges around our thing like that and if I go back to this and here execute you'll see now that this is aligned with our edge and if we go back into this tool we can see there everything's aligned now we can actually decide which ways up and all the rest of it let's go into our world coordinates we may want this Zed here to be pointing in the y direction so I think this might be up let's test this theory so by doing that now if we sent this out go to our coordinates and actually center out our rotation of 0 without sorry it should be this is standing up and in the correct place and now this is in the this is in the right spot we can also change this back to normal in fact I'm to turn alignment off now and go back to our Center tool and we can actually zero out the position on the X and the Z and in fact we could center out of the Y as well and then make sure it's sat on the floor so now we've got a door orientate correctly and we've sort out the axis for that even though it's a proper dodgy situation so that's how we use the alignment as well now we've got a couple of check boxes over here called include children and use all objects so let's have a look at include children so again I'm gonna create another box and let's just hit T and scale this down and I'm just gonna move it over here and make this a child of the cube so cube one is our child there and we'll make that editable now as you can see it's access is right in the middle and this access is where we left it so with include children if I wanted to move the access of this in the positive Z and hit execute focus on selected points that's why it wasn't doing anything let's go all points and press execute it'll move it to the extremities of this side of the object but with include children checked it will also move the access of this object as well so a low value a is child and move its access all the way over to so let's put this back to the middle again and as you can see that's moved but this one hasn't and that's because I had the child selected and I had include children and this hasn't got any children so if I select our parent again and execute this we'll be back to the middle and this will be back to the middle as well so let's turn this off so the next option we've got is a user object so if we select our parent hit use all objects and execute not a lot happens because this is already in the center and if you select our child that's already in the center too so you probably think you've more boss the point of this use all objects well if we use all objects and in combination with include children you'll see there does this so why it does is it evaluates everything within this hierarchy so even though the child saxis has not changed the parent if we select that that will evaluate the points of the parent object and its children this also works in nulls as well so if we create a null object and then put both of these in it not in a hierarchy like so and then select the null and execute it we'll look at everything within itself to define where this access should be and just one more thing before I go and that is the auto update so so far to establish the access position of this object I will you know set where I want it to be and then hit execute and we've got this auto updater so if we check this box on and change this it will just all update accordingly it's not necessary to hit this execute button I'm not actually quite I'm not actually sure what the editor update does in the help documentation it says the option makes sure the object axis is updated for the access to option well we're already on access to and we're moving this and it is updating so I don't know whether that's necessary or not really I mean when it's on it does exactly the same thing anyway that's pretty much it guys I'm sure you'll agree that this is a powerful tool and it saves a lot of faffing around when you can just use this dialog to achieve the results that you want to achieve I find you're so useful that I've got it up in my UI and I use it quite a lot so I just thought I'd go for that okay guys cheers for listening bye [Music] you

Channel: DIGITAL MEAT

Views: 17,452

Rating: 4.9053254 out of 5

Keywords: Digitalmeat.uk, Cinema 4D, C4D, Cinema4D, Digitalmeat, Greyscale Gorilla, GreyscaleGorilla, 3D, Workflow, Cinema 4D Workflow, C4D Workflow, Tutorial, Tutorials, Cinema 4D Tutorial, Cinema 4d Tutorials, C4D Tutorial, C4D Tutorials, Mograph, Axis Center, Axis Center Tools, C4D Tools, Cinema4D Tools, Cinema 4D Tools, Axis, Axis Control

Id: DSZ5avwtFLQ

Length: 22min 47sec (1367 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 15 2020