How to Move the Origin Point in Blender With Simple Techniques

understanding the origin point in blender is incredibly important but it can be rather difficult to work with i'm henning from footballs and in this video we will demystify the origin point and we'll teach you how to control it in blender we have a scene with three cubes we have the good we have the naughty and we have the super naughty and we will try to simply scale these down normally the behavior we expect is that it would just scale towards the center of the object if we select this one and we scale it down but you can see that it scales down correctly it is indeed the good cube this one scales towards one of the corners which makes it slightly good makes it a little naughty and this one on the other hand is super knotty because this one just scales to some weird point in space and what is going on here what's happening is that if we were to investigate this a bit further we if we go in and we click on the object you can see that there is a little orange dot in space somewhere by default this would be in the center of the object but you can move this around so here you're seeing that this dot is here and in this case this has just been moved a crazy amount over here now this might seem more like a stylist example where the origin point is completely different spot but it's very easy for this to happen let's take this example here we now go into the object we move it around and we move it in component mode meaning we move it in polys and now you can see that the origin point is now in a different spot so the origin point is essentially determining where the object is in space this is incredibly important to know when you're dealing with anything involving manipulation of the object such as moving translation or scale because this determines where it rotates scales and moves the point from now in order to control the origin point directly we can do this in a few different ways first off we have to be in object mode for this so make sure you are indeed in object mode then we can click on the object where we want to manipulate the origin point then we can go to object set origin and here we have five options such as geometry to origin origin to geometry and we'll cover these in a little bit first off what i want to show you is there is a pie menu associated with these options we can access this by going to edit preferences and now we just search for pi and if we go under the menu now weeks now we see how we have a pi menu i've already enabled this and if we scroll down a little bit you can see that we have an origin pi which has to hold the ctrl alt x and we have now enabled this and we can now just close this down again so going through some of these features if we hold down ctrl alt and x now there are a few here i tend to use the first one is geometry to origin this actually moves the geometry to where the origin point is so we click this one now you see that the geometry is now moved so that the origin point is now in the center second one i use is origin to geometry this puts it in the center of the object which is what i use quite a lot then we have origin to cursor and this puts the origin point to where the 3d cursor is now you can move that reader cursor around by holding down the alt key and right mouse button so you can move this to anywhere you really want to so now if you want the origin point to be there you simply hold down control alt x then we go origin to cursor and now you have moved the origin to where the cursor is where this is useful particular origin the cursor is that we can now control the origin point and put this in an exact point so if we want to have the origin point in this spot right there in this exact point what we can do is we can hit shift and s this brings up the radial menu for the 3d cursor so what we can now do is we can do cursor to active which puts the 3d cursor to what's currently selected now you can see we have the 3d cursor right there you can move it here shift s cursor active and so on really useful stuff and then we can go into object mode and we can hold down control alt x and then we can do origin to cursor and that moves the origin point to this exact area something i also recommend you to do is i recommend that you go in and set a hotkey to this one here origin to geometry this is basically if you're familiar with other software this is essentially the closest thing you'll get to center pivot because now it will just be moved to the right to the center here the quick way of adding a hotkey would be to go to again with object mode enabled go to object set origin and then right click on origin to geometry and then we can assign a hotkey and hotkey i recommend is alt and c and there you go now if you want to center the pivot or rather center the origin you simply hit alt and c and now now you can move the origin point to the center very quickly alton c doesn't also conflict with anything that important in blender so it's a pretty good hotkey now if you want to control the origin point with more precisionless like now we could move the 3d cursor and we can move the origin pointer cursor but if you want to actually control it directly there is a way of doing that as well this one we can enable it with the end key then we go to tools then we go to options transform here you can see that we have effect only and this is origin so now if we click this you see this the gismo actually changes a little bit what we do now is we are actually moving the origin point directly which is really cool if you want to disable this again you just hit origins so with enabled you can move it here and you can move it to wherever you want to where this becomes powerful is if we use this in conjunction with snapping you can enable snapping shift and tab go up here and now we can set this to vertex and now we simply snap this to the different points and now we have successfully snapped this the origin point to a vertex so really useful stuff let's just disable snapping again and then we can disable effect only and origins if you are hovering over this though you also see shortcut and you see control and period so let's try that if we use the shortcut control in period you can now see that this also enables and disables the control the origin point directly like this so this is really my preferred way of moving the origin point control in period and then just moving it around to wherever you want to often in conjunction with snapping something to be aware of though when you are moving the origin point if we enable this backing now and we start to move it around it's not just moving the origin point you can also rotate and scale it so for instance if we were to rotate this let's just use the manipulator as a base or c and we would now start to rotate this and then go back out of origin manipulation mode now you can see that it doesn't really look like the rotation affected too many things if we try to rotate this right now it's still just world space but what happens if we now go in and we change this to local view now you can see that the rotation we set in the origin actually propagates through and this is now the origin of this is now the local axis of this object so you have to be pretty careful with rotation unless you want to completely change the local axis of an object now how do you get back from this let's say you have rotated it it's very easy to do it's the same way you reset rotation in general in blender which is alt r and now you can just move here now the second example we will take a look at is using modifiers and how the origin point is relating to that if we have a simple plane here and we are using modifiers on this these will use the origin point to source where it starts from so if we now select the object go under modifiers and then under modifiers we generate and we select a screw modifier this is probably the easiest example if we now set the screw amount to something a little less crazy so something like this and now you can see this goes straight up because the origin point is in the center now what if we move the origin point let's enable snapping again so it's a bit easier to snap the origin point and then control in period and now if we hit the g key now and we were to move this to different points to different verts you can now see this completely changes how the modifier reacts this would be the same if you're using a mirror modifier and you might have experienced this where you're trying to mirror a face and um like an actual head and the mirror modifier doesn't actually mirror from the center that would be because the origin point will be somewhere else and that's when you want to just move this in to the exact point you want it to go so modifiers are heavily dependent on where the origin point is now in our last example here we have a model from model haven and we want to rotate this handle around now what you might want to do is you select rotary tool and you just kind of start to rotate this thing around but you can see it rotates from the wrong point what we want to do is we want to put the origin point right here you could of course move the 3d cursor to a specific point let's say you want to go into edit mode select this and then cursor to active now you can hit the period key and then we want to use the 3d cursor for as a pivot that's fine you can do that and now this is going to rotate perfectly fine the problem with this approach is that now what if you move the 3d cursor if we move it over here now it's going to rotate it from the 3d cursor so a more permanent approach to this is to move the origin point directly and this is very simple and i'll show you both ways of doing this first you figure out exactly where you want the origin point to be in this case that would be in the center of this handle so hit the tab key select the point you want to go to and then you hit shift s and cursor to active now this moves the cursor here and then we hit the tab key you have to be in object mode in order to affect the origin control alt x and then we go to origin to cursor and now there we go now this has been moved to this exact point the second way of doing this if we just don't do this is if we again go into control and period mode and now we can enable snapping just make sure it's at the vertex and then we can just snap it to this exact point and hit alt r to change the rotation of it so that the local rotation doesn't go crazy so alt and r and now you have the rotation you see here as well the it's scaled up like crazy so what you can do we can just scale it up like so the scaling is useful if you have objects which are of completely different scale and you want you don't want the origin point to just be so large so now if we hit control period again to go out of the origin editing mode and we now hit the period key and change this to something like active element now it's not using a 3d curve so the 3d cursor can be wherever you want to and now this is going to rotate perfectly around this exact point so that's it for this video the origin point is really easy to control just to sum it up the origin point is essentially where the 3d object is in space if you want to manipulate the origin point i recommend you use the the pi menu which is controlled alt and x which gives you this menu here if you want to move the point directly you hit control and period and now you can move the point wherever you want to and if you want more control you enable snapping and you enable vertice snap or something else if you want to snap to that and then you simply just move it around and be aware that the rotation of the origin point is highly important because that determines the object's local axis so i hope you enjoyed this video if you want to see any more blender videos like this let us know in the comments we read all the comments and we really enjoy them and we definitely take video requests based on that so i 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Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 11,881

Keywords: 3d, tutorial, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, art, art school, art tutorials, learning 3d, cube brush, blender guru, cgi, b3d

Id: 9bxOKHx2VuU

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 19 2021