From the course: Alias Essential Training

Moving geometry - Alias Tutorial

From the course: Alias Essential Training

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Moving geometry

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- In this video, we're going to take a look at moving geometry, and in particular, what's the difference between global and local axes when you're doing a move. Let's take a look at this very simple scenario. I'm going to take this sphere, and I'm going to double-click on Transform Move. We're on Global. I'm going to say, go to this. Now, I'm going to move this sphere 100 millimeters in the x direction. So go up to the very top here. I can do 100 0 0, 100 x, zero y, zero z, enter, and that's exactly what I expect. Control z. I can actually go ahead and just type in 100, and if y and z are both zero, I can just return, like that. Let's do the same for this one over here now. But this sphere, I want to also move this in the x direction 100 millimeters. Let's go ahead, click on Global, and I'm going to type 100 in the top here. Then you notice what happens. it jumps all the way down to the bottom here because the setting is set at Global, and this is my global axis. So it moves 100 millimeters in the global direction. Now, that's not what we want. So control z that. Double-click. We're going to go to Local, and we'll say go. And you notice now, we have a new triad appears at the origin of the sphere. That's the local axis. Now if I type in 100, that's exactly what I want. We could do the same for a CV. Let's pick this CV, double-click, reset. Now, if we have global on, it could be a potential problem here. Let's type 100 in here, and again it jumps all the way back down to 100 with reference to our global axis. Let's control z that. What we want to do is, set this to Local. We'll say Go, type in 100, and that's the result we're looking for. Now, there is another way of moving the CV 100 millimeters in the x direction, and that's by using the Transform CV tool. Let's activate that with the spacebar. We're going to pick CV, xyz, step size 100, and then just very simply pick the CV and then, with the middle mouse button, because we're going in the x direction, just click to the right or click to the left, and it will jump 100 millimeters. We can actually pick all of the CVs and do the same command. But we have to activate this again, and it jumps like so. Essentially, we're doing a translate on the whole entity. Okay. Let's try another challenging scenario here. We want to take this sphere and we want to move it in this vector 100 millimeters. In this case here, what we have to do is, we have to use planes to set up our axes. Let's go to Construction, Plane. Again, it doesn't really matter which one we choose here. We're going to go straight to picking this vector. As soon as we pick the vector, we have an option to change the vector by 90 degrees. The one that we need is this one right here. I'm going to go back to the top view, and let's say next plane. Okay, let's go to Construction. Let's set that as our new construction plane and our new axes. But you'll notice my x is going in the wrong direction. If I want my x to go in this direction, I need to redefine this plane. We could still move this using the y axis, but I want to use it with the x axis. So let's go ahead, select this plane, I'm going to go to Rotate, and I'm going to use my right mouse button, because I'm rotating in the z axis, and simply rotate roughly 90 degrees, control five, and I just changed this to 90. Now, you notice the x hasn't changed even though I've rotated the plane. So I'm going to go back to Construction, Set Construction Plane, and just reset that construction plane. Now that's what I'm looking for. Okay, let's go ahead and select this entity. Let's go to Move, and we'll set to Global, and we'll say Go. Let's type in 100 for x. But again, you'll notice it jumps to this point here, because that's my new global axis. Control z, double-click. Let's switch to Local and let's say Go. But my local axis is still set at the old location. In other words, this is not going to give me the correct result. I need to reset my local axis to reflect the global axis. And how we do this is, we go to Transform, Local, Set Local Axis, and I'm going to select Reset, and we're going to say Go. What this does, it resets the local axis to line up with the global axis. Now if I go to Move, I'll leave it on Local, and we're going to say 100. That's exactly the result I'm looking for. Now, in this case, I can go back to Construction, Toggle Construction Plane, and we're back to where we started, but I've moved that in this vector 100 millimeters.

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