New to Community - from Maya - pivots and aligns

[Rudy3D (rf)]

Hi all!
I’m Rudy, I work in the VFX industry as a modeler and just decided to switch from Maya to Blender for a while. I already love the feel of it!

I’m aware there will be similar questions to this but I hope a good soul will be able to kindly help out with my specific request: in Maya a great deal of work is done by snapping aligning and centering pivots.

I was wondering for basic tasks such as: aligning pivot to center of object, snapping pivot to 0, copying pivot from one object to the other, etc is there a particular addon which is recommended or the native tools are just good to go?

Many thanks! Happy 2021
Rudy

[Stan_Pancakes (Stanislav Blinov)]

Hi and welcome to BA!

There are indeed some add-ons that work with “pivots”, though I find that, especially in modern versions, the built-in tools work pretty decently.

First of all, there’s a number of built-in pivot points, including the 3D cursor which you can freely move and snap with the Cursor tool.

Secondly, for object mode, if you want to actually change the object’s origin, there’s the Object -> Set Origin menu with some quick positioning options, and you can also transform and snap the origin with the help of the ‘Affect Only Origins’ option:

Snap the pivot of an object to another object's pivot

Hi, What would be the simplest and more efficient way to snap the pivot of 1 mesh to another object’s pivot? If that’s possible? [Blender_snap_v01] Cheers, Jacques

So e.g. the above you can use to copy the origin from one object to another. To move the origin to world center, you can enable the ‘Affect Only Origins’ option and then do a Object -> Clear -> Location.

[Rudy3D (rf)]

Hey Stan thank you for your patience, that’s handy.
What about centering the origin/pivot to the bounding box of an array? So that I could easily align the centers of eg.: one object (a table) to an array of cups without loosing the modifier.

I found a few “hacks” to center the pivot to an array but there’s probably quicker solutions?

[TKIO (Jacques Defontaine)]

Thank you Stan. Quite useful!

Cheers,

Jacques.

[Stan_Pancakes (Stanislav Blinov)]

AFAIK, there aren’t any quick built-in solutions to that. What I’d do is make a duplicate of the array, apply the modifier and center the 3D cursor to that, then get rid of the duplicate, and put the other object at the 3D cursor.
Or, sometimes you can use the Multiple Snap Targets:

3d cursor and snapping modes, Face question only

Transform snapping (i.e. snapping while moving/rotating/scaling) to face centers does not exist in Blender, only to faces (that is, to any arbitrary point on a face). What @rigoletto described was Multiple Snap Targets, with which you can “find” a face center by snapping to several vertices. [image]

I.e. with an array you could just snap to the two opposite verts and find the center that way.

[Rudy3D (rf)]

Definitely a few things to play with, thanks a bunch!

[Rudy3D (rf)]

I also appreciate the top right tab Options to move only the origin pivot in Maya style introduced in 2.8 - that’s also very cool

[0rAngE]

I use Wazou Pie Menus. Here’s a screenshot of the Origin/Pivot Pie (he’s got a lot of different Pie Menus as part of this addon)

I know that MACHIN3tools has something similar.

There are others as well, lots.

To cut the long story short, Pie Menus/addons are your friend!!!