Change z up to y up

Sorry if this has been discussed before. I did a search on the forums for “z up” and “y up” to no avail.
I have changed my preset to Maya input.
How can I change the world space in Blender to y-up instead of z-up.:o

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hey,

there are several thread that deal with this “issue” but I can’t find any at the moment either. Basically to say it is not possible. I asked that very same question but apparently the x-y-z axis configuration is so inherently interwoven and starts at the very fundamental of the code, it would be impossible to change it and it will be unlikely they will do so in future.

I would have wanted it changed too but hey, who am I to complain.

I wouldn’t want it changed. Z has always been the up and down vector in the 3D space. Y is up and down for the 2D space only. This is the way I take it: X for strafe, Y for depth, Z for up/down. Anyway, this is all very subjective, so there’s always the Maya preset option in 2.53, from the Input tab in the Preferences window.

What helps me remember is Z for Zenith.

But for texturing Z is Z like it is in most other progs. Confusuing. But hope this helps.

So you want to change the Cartesian coordinate system? What is the point of doing that? What advantages do you gain from that?

To match the top/side/front views used in some other 3d applications maybe, if they are more familiar with them or to allow better file import/export between them.

i think maya is like that, not sure

Maya and Unity are both Y-up apps. I can deal with the z-up system but importing and exporting become a little more complex.

In what import/export scripts have you had this? I have imported vertex animations and objects to and from LightWave with no issues so far. Most of the scripts should take care of this translation I would think. What problems are you experiencing? I’d like to know for future potential work related issues that may come up.

I know this thread is quite old now, but I’ve discovered that exporting animations to Collada format for importing into Lightwave results in the entire scene rotated 90 degrees around the X axis. There are ways of fixing this (parenting the objects, lights and cameras to a Null Object in Lightwave, then rotating the Null -90 degrees around the X axis), but if you’re doing a lot of animation on a lot of objects, this might require a lot of adjustments.

Additionally if you’re using Blender to do animation work with Bullet (I find it easier to set up realistic animations using the Physics engine, as it’s far more realistic than trying to keyframe by hand especially with complex object interactions) with objects created in Lightwave, you find that either:

  1. You have to replace the objects that you re-imported back into Lightwave for rendering (and subsequently rotate them to match your scene), or
  2. You have a lot of clean-up and re-surfacing work to do on those objects you imported back in.

Neither solution is elegant. It would be much easier to sort out the Y-Z axis disparity somehow (perhaps creating a LWS exporter that does the rotation work for you) so that the only thing you have to do is replace your objects in Lightwave with ones suitable for rendering in the LW Render Engine.

After leaving one personal project on the back burner for a while, I came back to it and found that the solution is to use the FBX format and import it into Lightwave with a Scale value. This not only scales up the scene to the correct measurement units, but it also rotates the scene 90 degrees upward, resulting in the correct orientation of the scene.

The object replacement issue still persists however.

I would check lightwave’s import options, most apps that use the hollywood setup of y up have an option to correct orientation from apps using the correct coordinate system.
Some apps also allow you to choose Z up or Y up. Z up is the standard for geometry.

If you haven’t updated, be sure you’re using LightWave 10.1 it’s Valkyrie plugin (for file save/load and import/export) has been greatly updated and should automatically detect a z-up project and fix it.

I’ve done some samples with the FBX, but it doesn’t seem to be exporting my animation – even though I have it checks. I am trying to go into Cinema 4D, not lightwave.

Is anyone else having issues getting animation to transfer with FBX?