From the course: Maya 2022 Essential Training

Manipulate pivots - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya 2022 Essential Training

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Manipulate pivots

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- [Narrator] When you rotate and scale objects in Maya, you do that around what's called a pivot point. Now that pivot point can be placed wherever you want, in relation to the object. So let's take a look at this truck. Now I have the wheels of the truck selected, and when I select that wheel notice how the gizmo is pretty much centered to that wheel. So if I were to select my rotate tool, those wheels rotate around the center, which is what they're supposed to do. If I were to go up here to the donut and let's say I wanted to spin the donut around. Well, in this case, the pivot is not centered to the object and I'm rotating around a pivot point that is slightly off. So we can manipulate this pivot point to be wherever we want. Now we can do this in a couple of different ways. So in this case, I can take this pivot point and do modify, center pivot. And that will take all of the geometry of the object and just calculate the geometric center. So if I do center pivot here, that will pretty much be at the center of the donut. And if we rotate now, you'll see we get the effect that we want. Now we can be more precise by this by positioning the pivot exactly where we want. And we can do that by holding down the letter D and notice how my icon changes. So when I hold down that letter D it actually allows me to move that pivot. So here I moved it above the object, but in this case I want the pivot to be kind of right at the base of the object. So I can, again hold down D and move that wherever I want. If I hold down D I can also rotate that pivot wherever I want. So now I've got this pivot, and it's rotated along this object. Now if I select this object here, the hatch of the door. You'll see that my pivot point is not centered. So if I were to rotate this to say to open and close that hatch, it's not rotating around the proper axis. Well again we can hold down the D key to move that. So if I move that over, and up a little bit you can see that now when I rotate it, it's pretty close. But again, let me go ahead and manipulate that. There we go. Okay, so now it's pretty close, but this is at an angle. So I want that pivot to be aligned with this. So again, hold down D and I can rotate this so that the pivot is essentially at the same angle as the object. So now this Y axis is up in relation to that object. So now when I rotate that and it goes all the way down, my pivot points are pretty much aligned. So as you can see pivots are important for how objects rotate and scale. And we can manipulate pivots either by centering them, or explicitly positioning them by holding down the D key.

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