From the course: 3ds Max 2021 Essential Training

Rotating pivot points - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2021 Essential Training

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Rotating pivot points

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- [Instructor] In the previous movie, we moved the pivot point of an object so that the transforms will be calculated relative to some position that we choose. Now we'll see how to rotate the pivot points so that we can choose how it's aligned and that's important for animation. We can see that clearly in the front view port here. If I select this shoulder right and I'm in the rotate tool and local coordinates, I see the orientation of the pivot point indicated by the rotate gizmo itself. As long as we're in local space, the rotate gizmo shows us the orientation of the pivot point and it is not aligned with the object. So I will have a hard time if I try to rotate or animate this and move in a natural fashion. So for example, if I go over to the perspective you right-click in that viewport and try to rotate. We'll see that it's spinning around the world X-axis and it's not rotating relative to the objects orientation. All right, I'll undo that. Well, there's an easy fix for this. We can just rotate the pivot point over in the hierarchy panel will enable effect pivot only and to make it a little bit easier on myself, I can enable angle snaps that will constrain angular rotations to five degree increments and I'm rotating in local space, right click in the front view so we don't lose our selection and rotate 10 degrees around the local Y-axis. And as we rotate, we see some statistics displayed above the rotate gizmo. So I want to rotate that 10 degrees and now that pivot point is perfectly aligned with the geometry. Now we can test it will disable the effect pivot only and rotate in local space once again, back in the perspective, you all right click there and rotate around the local X-axis and now I'm getting the desired rotation, the objects local space is now aligned with the geometry. All right, I'll undo that with Control Z. I need to repeat that process for the other shoulder over here. Shoulder left, but I want to do something a little bit clever here. It would be convenient to simultaneously rotate the two arms in opposite directions. To accomplish that, I'm going to orient this object's pivot differently than the other one. Once again with a select and rotate tool, active and local coordinate space and angle snaps enabled, I'll turn on effect pivot only and I want to rotate 180 degrees around the local X-axis so I can tumble in the perspective view and rotate around the X-axis exactly 180 degrees. Just keep rotating that until that display reads 180 then we also want to rotate 10 degrees around the local Y-axis. We can do that in the front view port, right-click in that view so we don't lose our selection and rotate 10 degrees around the local Y-axis. Now we can test it. Disable effect pivot only and let's select both of the shoulder objects. Hold down Control and select the shoulder, right object. And very importantly, we need to change our transform coordinate center because when we make a multiple objects selection, by default, our transform center is going to be the selection center. But in this case, we want it to be the pivot point center, which is the first button on that rollout. And now the rotate gizmo actually moves to the pivot point of one of the objects and we can test our rotation. So I'm rotating around the Y-axis and the objects are moving in opposite directions. I want to do that, but if I rotate around the X-axis, they move in the same direction. I will undo that. All right, that is the process of rotating pivot points in preparation for building a hierarchy. It's always a best practice to move and rotate the pivots for all the objects in the hierarchy before creating any parent child links.

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