How to use Transform Orientation and Transform Pivot point in Blender - Practical 3d Modeling

in this video we're going to cover everything that you need to know concerning transform orientation and transform pivot point when it comes to 3d modeling in blender these two features allow you to adjust the constraints of your transformation tools in blender and they are exceptionally useful once you understand how to utilize them to get started your transform orientation and transform pivot point options are located in the toolbar at the top of the 3d viewport workspace with transform orientation being right here and transform pivot point right next to it conversely you can also use the comma key on the keyboard to bring up your transform orientation options and you can use the period key to access your transform pivot point options okay so now that you know where they are you're probably wondering what they are well transform orientation affects the axis of transformation while transform pivot point affects the point in 3d space for which your transformations are constrained are you confused okay let's jump into an example okay so we're in our example scene and we'll start talking about transform orientation now like i said transform orientation affects the axis for which your transformations are constrained to so we'll go ahead and select our little gizmo and over here on the side panel we have this one for move this one for rotate scale and this one has all three okay so by default the transform orientation in blender will probably be set to global which means we are viewing the axis of our object in world space so if we go ahead and we rotate our cube a little bit the axis has not changed at all but if we go ahead and switch from global to local you can see that the axis has changed to match the rotation we just made that's because we are now looking at our object's axis in local space so now if we select our object and we hit control a and we apply the rotation the object's local space will be realigned with the world space now conversely if we take our cube and we tab into edit mode and we rotate it a little bit we are creating this transformation in local space so if we go out of edit mode and we switch between global and local space you can see that nothing has changed that's because the transform we made was in local space now when working in 3d you're going to want to make sure that your world space and local space are aligned so that there isn't any confusion of the object's orientation when it's exported to another environment such as a game engine now moving on to the next transform orientation if we go to normal you're probably not going to see any change in object mode however once we go into edit mode and we select any face you can see that our axis is now constrained to the angle of direction of the face that we selected and we can see that in our overlay options here in which we can activate that for the faces now you can see that every face has this little line shooting out showing us the angle direction of that face now this also applies to things such as your edges and your vertices so we can go ahead and we can move this face along its normal direction we can go into edge select mode and we can move this edge along its normal direction and we can go into vertex select mode and we can move vertices along their normal direction as well now i find that this is one of the most useful transform orientation constraint options for me when i'm working on any sort of 3d modeling project i will be routinely switching between this and the local and global transform orientations the next transform orientation option is gimbal and in all likelihood you're not going to find a whole lot of use for this when you're working on 3d modeling as this changes your axis to be relative to whatever method of rotation that you have set for your object in blender now by default as far as i know you're probably only going to be using xyz euler rotation this might be more useful if you're an animator and you have to switch between other settings such as quaternion or other rotation options after gimbal the next transform orientation constraint is view which will simply change your axis to match whatever the present viewport angle is and you can go ahead and select anything and rotate around and the axis will stay constrained to your viewport likewise this is only really useful if you have to make a transform that is constrained to your present viewport angle the last transform orientation constraint to talk about is the 3d cursor transform constraint so if i hold shift and i right click anywhere in 3d space i have just moved my 3d cursor to that point likewise when i did that the 3d cursor also matched the axis of rotation for whatever was my present viewport angle at that time so if i click it again you can see it's perfectly aligned to my viewport until i rotate around it and you can see that that cursor is at an angle so if we go ahead and we switch our transform orientation to 3d cursor it's going to match up with the axis of our 3d cursor and it's good to know but it's not something that i find a lot of particular use for when i'm 3d modeling okay so we covered all the constraints when it comes to transform orientation let's move on to transform pivot point so by default your transform pivot point constraint will be set to median point which means your target point of transformation is set at the median of your selection now if we go into edit mode and we change our pivot point constraint to active element now if we select a couple of edges our pivot point will be set to whatever the active element that we selected is and usually that's the last element that we selected so we're selecting edges here and i can select as many as i want or deselect and whatever is bright white and highlighted here will be our active element so if i select this one now that's the active element so now whenever i make a transformation like a rotation it will occur from this target point now this pivot point constraint is exceptionally useful and is honestly something that i should start using a lot more often in my workflow because it would save me a lot of time the next pivot point constraint that we'll talk about is going to be individual origin so i'm going to select this cube and i'm going to duplicate it now i'm going to select both cubes and if i have my pivot point set to median then if i were to do a scaling transformation you can see that both cubes are scaling down and scaling inwards towards that pivot point now say i want to scale these cubes down but i don't want to change their position in local space so if i go to individual origins and i start scaling you can see that both cubes are scaling down but their location in local space is not changing they're both scaling independently of one another likewise if i'm to go back and if i were to select individual elements of a single object and on and with our pivot point set to median and if i do a scaling transformation you can see that both edges are scaling down while also scaling inward to that pivot point likewise with these two elements which are not connected to one another if i go to individual origin and i scale down then they will both scale independently of one another okay now the next pivot point constraint to talk about is 3d cursor so if i go ahead and i select this edge i hit shift s and cursor 2 selected our cursor snaps to that edge now i'm going to select this entire face and with it set we still have it on individual origin okay so i'll scale it and as you can see this is a pretty normal scaling operation with the face scaling in and out from that center point but now if we go back and we set our pivot point to 3d cursor and we start scaling you can see it scales inward to that 3d cursor location because the 3d cursor is our target pivot point now i do have a tendency to use this a lot but like i said earlier a lot of the operations that i use this for when 3d modeling could actually be done quicker if i were using the active element pivot point so if i switch this to active element and i select these edges and the last one i select is this edge then you can see we still have that same pivot point it's the same operation but honestly using active element just might be a bit faster and just to mention the last pivot point constraint i'll just say that i never really understood or got the concept of bounding box center so if you find some particular use for this pivot point constraint please let me know in the comments below because as you can see there's only i only ever see a slight difference between this and median point i know something is changing and it has to do with the bounding box order of our object but in all honesty i have never found a particular use for this pivot point constraint okay so let's give an example of how to use transform pivot point so let's say that i want to flip open the eyepiece on my camera and i want it to pivot on this little cylinder rod piece here so what i'm going to do is i'll select the eyepiece and i'll also select the body of the camera which has this little rod tab into edit mode and i'm going to hide our eyepiece and select this little rod now if i select this part here i can hit shift s cursor to select it and switch my pivot point to 3d cursor now because this little piece here is a cylinder with no faces or any geometry closing the caps i couldn't use active element as my transform pivot point constraint because if i did it would move our pivot point to whatever the last selected or active element was so with my transform pivot point set to 3d cursor i'll then unhide our little eyepiece and i'll hit r for rotate x to constrain it on the x-axis and as you can see we can start flipping it up all right so if i hide my little eyepiece again real quick and i go back to this little rod now i explained why i couldn't use the active element pivot point transformation on this little piece here but as you can see if i go into x-ray mode this cylinder does have the caps actually closed so that could be usable as an active element pivot transformation constraint so i'll go back i'm going to unhide our eyepiece i'll press l to select this rod down here and then i'll select this face while i'll deselect it and then i'll reselect it and as you can see that end cap is highlighted bright white which means it's our active element so now if i go to pivot point transformation and i select active element you can see that our pivot point constraint has just popped to that location now if i press r x to constrain it on the x-axis i can flip open our little eyepiece the rest of the way now why am i showing you two ways to get the exact same pivot point location well like i said using the active element pivot point constraint might be faster in a lot of instances as where some cases like i said with this cylinder that doesn't have the end caps closed it wouldn't be appropriate or provide the same results all right so now i'm going to give an example of using transform orientation and we're going to go ahead and create this little hinge that goes from the lens cover of the camera to the main body and it's essentially the same process that i used over here for this hinge where i created a circle and then i selected these edges and extruded along the normal angle so if i go over here i already have this little cylinder piece made so i'm going to select this face this face and this face i'll then switch my transform orientation from global to normal and you can see how the orientation of our x has changed now if i extrude along the z axis you can see it extends that little hinge all the way over to the body of our camera at the angle we want pretty simple and as one last example because it's an operation i just do very often if we select the main body of this camera let's say that i want this little slanted edge to be a vertical flat edge well i could select these faces and i could hit s x to control it to the x axis and zero for zero scaling okay but say i didn't want the position of this top edge to move at all well what i could do is i can select these faces i can switch to active element and in edge select mode i can unselect this edge and reselect it now our pivot point has snapped to that location so if i hit s x to continue on the x axis and zero for zero scaling you can see that that top edge hasn't moved from its initial position and that covers pretty much everything you need to know about transform orientation and transform pivot point if you have any questions or you need any help please feel free to leave a comment below there will be a lot more videos to come in the practical modeling series as this is based on a lot of the questions you guys have been giving me in previous videos hopefully these will help you progress in your own 3d modeling projects good luck and i hope to see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Tosmo

Views: 2,525

Keywords: Blender 3d, Blender tutorial, Blender 2.8, how to, 3d modeling, blender 2.91 tutorial, 3d modeling blender, beginner 3d modeling, how to 3d model, game design, 3d modeling basics, blender pivot point, 3d transform constraints, constraint, blender ui, blender transform orientation, blender transform pivot point

Id: UZFEHjlsMeI

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2021