Welcome to pivot points in this video we're going to talk about pivot points and origins and how they
interact.
We'll take a closer look at pivot points.
There are five different types and the how they vary when you're modelling.
We'll talk about how to change them and go through the shortcut keys for them as well and things to
watch out for when you're modelling pivot points are one of those tripping things that if you don't
realize you've changed them or that you've set them incorrectly it can make modelling quite difficult.
So let's go explore pivot points now and hop on over in a blender.
Okay so in front of us we have a default blender file.
And I just want to say quickly that this is an insert into the course because there have been several
requests for pivot points to be covered a bit earlier on in the course.
So that's what we're doing.
And in this case we need to first find out where they are and if we go down to the 3D header toolbar
we see there is an option for pivot points.
And here we have a selection of five different pivot points active element median point individual origins
3D cursor and bounding box sent up.
Now we will use the three objects in our scene as the example for the pivoting.
Now if we go ahead and select the camera hold down Shift and select the lamp and Cube.
We've now got three objects selected and we can confirm that in the hierarchy as well over in the outliner.
So the first option is this median points.
Now I'd say the first option that's obviously not the one at the top is the default one that usually
you'll be set to and if we rotate around you'll see that the Widget the 3D manipulator widget is now
placed in the middle will kind of in the middle of these three places.
And that gives us a clue as to what's going to happen.
That does mean if we were to scale or rotate it would scale around or towards that point unescaped come
out.
It may even rotate around that point.
Pretty cool.
Pretty useful as well if that's what you want to be able to do.
Now let's go to the active element.
What does that mean.
Well you will notice at this point that now these 3D manipulator which has actually gone all the way
to the cube if you can't see this 3-d manipulator widget you may want to turn it on in the toolbar.
You may have clicked that by accident and turned it off.
Now with this you probably guessed already is going to rotate around the cube itself around the cubes
centre.
And that's all we all the way round.
Lots of fun to be had.
Individual origins can be incredibly useful when you're scaling things by their self or rotating them.
So if we rotate here you'll see that both the camera and the cube are rotating the lamp is as well we
just can't see it.
And again scaling will scale around their own origins.
Now what's the origin.
Here's that little orange or yellow dots in the middle of every object.
Now we'll cover that in much more detail later on.
Finally the 3D cursor and the reason why I say finally is because we're not really going to go into
the bounding box.
I'll show you all it does in a second anyway.
The 3-d cursor is the crosshairs that you move about all the time and we can see that because the 3D
cursor has been set as the pivot point the 3D manipulator which is also moving accordingly.
And now we would rotate and scale around that point.
So it's incredibly useful for certain tasks but incredibly frustrating when you trying to do something
and don't realize why blender is behaving oddly.
Now there are keyboard shortcut keys for all of this.
But before we do that I'm going to do the bounding box now have a look at the bounding box.
And now have a look at the medium points.
Now the bounding box is simply a box drawn around all of these objects.
And then the centre of that box is displayed and that's slightly different because of the shape of the
box then the medium point will be.
So there we go that takes into account the extra dimension on the cube here that goes out this way.
The medium point just takes the actual points that these origins exist in 3-d space.
So let's talk about shortcut keys.
So let's start with the 3-d cursor.
Because it's the simple one to get to.
That's the full stop or period key.
And we will see that the pivot point changes and that is one that gets people typing in values like
scale by two point three or something along those lines they don't quite have it all engaged properly.
It's very easy to hit the full stop or indeed any key on the keyboard since Blender's so keyboard heavy
and change the setting you didn't realize you could change.
Now colmar which is right next to the period full stop will change it to bounding box.
And then we need modifier keys for the next one.
So in order to do individual origin's we need to hold down control and full stop of all the period key
and then median is control and the karma and that sets us back to our default position.
And finally active element is altes and full stop.
And of course those that are on a system where the old key is a system key.
You may need to hold down the windows key at the same time that's particularly useful for Linux users.
So pivot points are incredibly useful and if you find Blender's being a bit weird when you're scaling
it's not doing what you think it should be doing.
Then do check your pivot point.
You may have changed it inadvertently or changed it and forgotten that you changed it.
The common ones to change them to are the 3D cursor individual origins and medium point.
I very rarely use active elliman or bounding box centre in my work.
And of course you know what time it is now.
It's time for a challenge.
I would like you to go ahead and scale a cube.
But in a particular way.
So you start from the default scene scale a cube from its base but without moving it.
And there will be several ways of achieving this.
She is scanning the cube from its base so essentially is base does not move from where it starts but
the rest of it will grow outwards from that base.
Pulls a video.
Think about it.
There are several ways of achieving this.
Neither are better than the alpha balls video now and give that a go.
Okay guys welcome back.
Let's go ahead and scale a cube from its base without moving it.
Okay so we're back into the default blender scene here and there are a couple of options.
One does involve kind of moving it so I'm going to rule that one out because you can move the origin
itself to the base and then just use the median tool or individual origins or active element and then
scale up from there.
But what we can do is we can actually put three the cursor on the base and I can approximate that by
moving around and clicking on the base.
And now it will scale outwards from the base itself.
If I have it in 3D cursor pivot point.
Now let's scale that and we can see the base is not getting any higher.
Now this is quite difficult to see from this angle.
So I'm going to go into orthographic projection mode and from the side and we should see here that is
one bloody unit negative on the z and one blender unit higher.
And if we scale up we notice that it doesn't get any lower.
It is literally scaling around that 3-d cursor.
Of course everything else is as well including the camera.
So I'm just going to select the cube by itself and make it larger.
And there we go we scaled it up from the base.
Excellent.
How did you guys get on please share your work in the forum.
And I will see you guys in the next lecture.