I’m trying to model a round airlock door (from Star Trek: The motion picture) I’ve traced the curves of 1/4 of the door, and now need to extrude and scale to get the panels etc. As you can see, when I select the vertices from one of the panels, blender creates a center point that is not where I need it for scaling.
Is there a way to move that center point?
If not am I missing some other way to scale this? I’m basically trying to do a bevel manually before I create all the faces.
Hi,
The centre is defined as the average position of all the vertices, so it is fixed for any particular selection. However, you could place the 3D cursor at the position you want (left click) and change the pivot to the 3D cursor (shortcut key: fullstop).
That looks… very difficult and error prone. You might want to think about using splines for this, much easier to do curves that way, and later you can convert to mesh if you need to.
thanks, that’s exactly what I was looking for. Is there a way to switch it back to the way it was? Just curious, as it now always puts the pivot at the cursor for this object.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve used splines in Maya, but never blender. Any good tutorials you can suggest?
How do you know when to use which tools? Just experience?
Hi,
Yes, you can change the pivot by using the icon in the header of a 3D window - it’s just about in the middle of the header. Click on it and it’ll bring up a dropdown titled “Pivot” and you can choose the mode you want (the default is Median Point).
Check out the user’s manual at the wiki: http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Main_Page
It’s still (always) under construction, but it’s full of really great stuff. If the feature you want isn’t documented on there, it’s probably being worked on!
I couldn’t find a tutorial on splines, so I finished it my way. It was tedious, but at least it looks close to what I was trying for.
