How to use Transform Orientations in Blender

i'm pretty sure most of you know that you can limit the transformation to a single axis by pressing x y or c on your keyboard this is really useful for a lot of tasks in 3d however there's much more you can do with this technique if you have a basic knowledge on transform orientations in this video i want to give you a rough overview on the different options there are and demonstrate them in a few practical examples the transform orientation menu can be found in the header of the 3d viewport per default this is set to global this means that any transformations i make like move rotate or scale follow the global orientation if i press g and then x the cube moves along the global x-axis if i rotate the cube now and do the same thing again g and x nothing changed the cube still moves in the same direction and follows the global x-axis if i change the orientation to local however and press g and x the q moves into a different direction it follows its local orientation you can see this if you take a look at the gizmo whenever i rotate the cube the local orientation follows in this example we have a pipe and the pipe joint which we want to move along it if we use the global orientation this is a really hard task and it's almost impossible to get it accurate but if we switch to the local orientation instead this becomes really easy now we can just use the c-axis to slide it along the pipe and if we want to bring this part to the end here we just move it there and rotate it 90 degrees along the y-axis this fits perfectly the next transform orientation we have is normal to use this we need to enter edit mode the normal is always the vector perpendicular to a face edge or vertex we can visualize this in blender by enabling the normals in the viewport overlay settings as you can see the z-axis of the gizmo is aligned with the normal if multiple faces are selected it calculates the average of the selected normals an example where we can use the normal orientation is to flatten this plane to do so enter edit mode select all the vertices and switch to the normal orientation now press s and c to scale them along their normal if you now press 0 they are all flattened out and we have a perfect plane another example where we can use the normal orientation is to edit landscapes to do so i enable proportional editing and move the parts i want to edit along their normals gimbal is a very specific orientation mode most blender users probably never need it is useful however if you are in the quaternion rotation mode i linked two really interesting videos in the description if you want to learn more about this topic the view orientation is based on the alignment of your current view the z-axis is perpendicular to you which is why you cannot see it if i open up another window you can see that the orientation is different for both of them this transform orientation is useful to move objects from the view of the camera if you move them along the c axis you can bring them nearer or further away from the current view the next orientation is cursor this transform orientation is based on the rotation of the 3d cursor to change this open up the end panel go to view and here on the 3d cursor you can adjust the rotation this can be useful if you want to extrude a face at the specific angle to do so enter edit mode select the face and press e x and x again last but not least i want to show you how you can create your own transform orientations to do so select an object open up the transform orientation menu and press on this little plus down here you can see the orientation we created and give it a name now we can use the local orientation of this cube to transform any other object in this example i have this cone which i want to move along the surface of this cube you might think that i can just switch to the local orientation to do this this doesn't work however since the rotation of this cone is already applied the other solution we have is to select a cube enter edit mode select this face and create a new orientation from it now we can use this orientation to slide the cone along the surface i hope you learned something new in this tutorial and you can apply this knowledge to your future projects if you have any questions or feedback on this video don't hesitate to leave a comment thanks for watching see you in the next one

Channel: Blender Daily

Views: 14,876

Keywords: Blender daily, blender, blender 3d, tutorial, blender.daily, tips, 3d, how to, How to use Transform Orientations in Blender, axis, limit axis, constrain axis, transform orientation, global, local, normal, gimbal, view, cursor, orientation, custom transform orientation, custom orientation, create transform orientation, transform orientation blender, transform, scale, rotate, move, shortcut, coordinates, constrain, limit, beginner, easy, global orientation, local orientation, align, move along axis, gizmo

Id: ABayYXu7OfI

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/bbrucesnell]

Very helpful tutorial, thank you!