Brilliant. I’m going to ask you all of my questions from now on.
I can’t wait for someone else to ‘fix it’. There isn’t anything broken, it’s a missing feature, and there is a feature freeze on blender right now AFAIK.
No wonder blender users have such a bad reputation.
@ uncle entity.
please stop being a douche, it won’t do any good. TBart has never asked anyone to implement this or said that developers have their priorities wrong. he just asked if this feature exists and when he found out it didn’t he made clear he would be happy if it were to be implemented. nothing wrong there, on the contrary, it is expected from the community. if no one would ask/bring focus to missing features they would never be implemented. if there is an obvious demand from users there is a greater chance the coders will implement the missing features. this particular feature is something i frequently find myself missing in blenders feature set, even after years of experience.
lastly, the fact that 2.5 is currently in beta stage has nothing to do with this problem as it is as difficult to bypass it in the stable 2.4x series. it’s a missing feature, not a bug
@TBart, people are being jerks because they’re trying to cover up the software’s lack of this particular feature (rotating the origin) by making it seem like not a big deal and acting like what you want to do is stupid. Some just tend to protect Blender viciously whether they’re right or wrong.
But don’t let that put you off, no software is perfect, and there’s only so much the devs can do in so little time. For now the best you can do about origin rotation is use Endi’s method. Otherwise, for translation it’s pretty straight forward, i use the 3D cursor for that, combined with “Snap Cursor to Origin” for aligning the origins of two objects in the same place.
Hey mate, we have something in common i’ve been a long time XSI user also. Started learning blender a couple of months ago. Sick of Autodesk releasing versions which are nothing more than point releases just to justify the maintenance cost IMHO. There’s been nothing really added since V7.
Anyway i have noticed a few things that seem to take a lot longer, one of my things is the bevel tool. 2 second job in XSI, messing around with the bevel modifier is harder work. i also so miss my add edge tool, its like a lost friend:D
But saying that ive really started to love the way Blender works and even found myself at work hitting the Blender hotkeys in XSI ! Ive even installed a copy of 2.5 on my machine to have a sneaky play at lunchtimes which doesn’t help:D
I have to keep reminding myself that 2.5 is only Alpha it just looks so polished and complete at first glance and i think that is part of my impatience with it sometimes.
I’ve noticed also things tend to get really heated over pretty small things in some of the threads here ( just look at the blender 2.5 development thread:eek:) but mostly ive found people to be helpful. A dam sight more helpful than some |XSI forums i could mention! Good luck on learning blender.
Uncle Entity’s behavior reminds me of what behavior people have accused the GIMP devs. of having in the past.
His behavior would make him a great GIMP developer because he’s an expert at bashing people who bring up shortfalls in a program. (and having the very aggressive open-source evangelism that comes with it)
@giant551: There was a bevel tool in 2.49, it have not been reimplemented yet but it will be back at some point (awaiting bmesh).
This is all well and good, but I thought I’d just remind people: every time someone posts a Support question in the News section, an angel’s wings are horrifically torn out, deep-fried and dipped in a honey barbecue sauce. So I hope you feel bad about that.
Well, when it comes to missing features Uncle entity offers very sound advice that;s appropriate to an open source project… people don’t like that, but I don’t see how t’s rude…
good or bad, you’re not dealing with a big company like autodesk, you’re not a “customer”…
so if the feature is missing and desirable to you then you can:
that’s just the way it is…
I’d add that a well thought out and presented proposal can help too. Just like I say to my kids, moaning gets you nowhere fast.
I’m not sure why one would need to change the rotation of the origin, but does ctrl-A in object mode actually do just that? Or a reasonable facsimile of?
Just complaining get you nowhere. A rule of thumb is to answer these questions:
What is bad?
Why is it bad?
How should it be done instead? (provide a good explanation, mockups etc.)
Most devs listen to critique and suggestions as long as it’s communicated in a good way. And it’s possible for an artist to influence things if you talk to the right person.
From what I gather they want to rotate the object without actually rotating the object.
Like if you rotated on the x-axis 60deg then went into edit mode and counter-rotated the geometry 60deg.
Not too clear on what it’s useful for though.
it’s useful because the manipulator’s “local” orientation is now not the "world "one…
…a maya user will do this temporarily in the same way a blender user might store a
“custom orientation” for the manipulator…something I do all day long when modelling architecture environments…
which might be a workflow that is useful to the original poster I guess… or maybe they are trying to achieve something else?
This wasn’t too hard to do in 2.4x:
No such script in 2.5 yet. (Wouldn’t be hard to do)
There is something somewhat similar where you can set Transform Orientations from other objects in the 3D view properties panel. But it’s not quite the same since you are “borrowing” another objects transform orientation rather than actually copying it to the local orientation. (Also it’s kind of a pain to use as a replacement for modifying the axis orientation because it applies to every object in the viewport, rather than to individual objects)
To get back to the original question, this was for rigging? Which means you want to be able to determine the origin angle for bones right?
I know in LightWave you could rotate the pivot point of a bone. This is very useful feature.
Could you be more specific with why it is you’d want to rotate the origin of the bone and in what circumstance? I’d like to know a little about your rigging workflow because I have heard great things about XSI CA tools.
I think the good thing is that when you are working with bones in Blender you are using the same manipulator as all objects so you using the same origin settings you can set up globally. The bad thing is when you are working with bones in Blender you are using the same manipulator as all objects so you using the same origin settings you can set up globally. 
I think Transoform orientations is the best solution of all. You’d have to store settings for every bone though, and that is a pain. Also setting it up for rigging is a pain.
But I have done a small amount of rigging in Blender compared to LightWave so I can not really comment too much on this side of it. (though from the rigging I’ve seen and the animation I have seen in Blender it seems hardly a drawback as animating in Blender seems so much easier to me than LightWave - but as you could guess my experience is limited to these two programs) But from LightWave end of things I’d say it is a useful feature and I’d love it if you could share your needs in more detail. For me at least, it’d be educational.
I was making a manikin to use as a reference for drawing because when I draw people I always start by blocking them out. It is a very simple character, really just blocks with the proper proportions and landmarks for things like nipples and places where bone shows through the skin. Instead of worrying about rigging things up to test how they look when moved, I set up simple parent relationships for things like the finger joints, but this is difficult when the origin can’t be rotated by itself. You know, the axes need to be lined up in the same direction, along the finger bone for example. Hope that makes sense. Yes, if I had planned the modeling process out better, I would not have needed to rotate the origin, but I didn’t realize what I couldn’t do until I reached it, as I am very new to blender. I know next to nothing about rigging in blender, but I don’t think this will be an issue for the real rig because the bones already have the proper axes. This wasn’t intended to be a big deal, and I’m not complaining or moaning like some say, I was just asking a simple question.
Rigging in XSI is awesome. The best thing about it is that you can envelope to anything. I had some very complex rigs using nulls constrained to curves and planes, and all of my rigs had the mesh enveloped to polygon objects, such as the manikin I’m making, or nulls, then those were constrained to the actual bones. Very powerful.
Be a lot easier to make a simple rig and parent the objects to the individual bones so you can do all the clear rotation/scale/location stuff on it and have it return to the initial pose position instead of, well, don’t actually know what would happen with objects parented to each other when you do that. Probably not what you’d expect at the very least.
It’s hard sometimes to see the right answer when it’s a “basic” of working with blender, but yes. uncle entities suggestion is the “recommended” way to so this kind of thing… works really nicely for resetting positions/rotations, works great with “actions” and the non linear animation editor…
not sure if it’s still the case, but this was how things used to be in motionbuilder too…
Richard, surely with bones: blender’s seperation of edit mode and pose mode negates the need for bone rotation like in lightwave… certainly in any of my work it has never been an issue… though admittedly I do a lot less animation than stills…
That is interesting. This may be why I have found the process fairly straight forward so far.
I don’t have any complaints about rigging in Blender so far, though what I have done is very little. I suppose I’ll have to revisit this again when I get around to doing more rigging.
Thanks for the perspective.
TBart - thanks for the info.
Yeah, that sounds a lot easier.
Parenting objects together in a series will make the objects act like they were in FK, very basic. I think it is just a holdover from XSI for me as it isn’t very useful in blender because there is no local coordinate system that I’m aware of. In XSI the child would use the coordinates of the parent, so the origin of the parent would be 0,0,0 for the child. That is very easy to return to neutral pose because you just set everything to zero, while the global system blender uses will have numbers all over the place.