To those of you that’ve taken Udemy’s Complete Blender Course, this might be familiar.
I’m trying to scale a cylinder around a reference image to create the base of a chess piece, but when I try, it seems to scale toward the front, leaving me with a notably off-center image.
From the front, yay!
From the side, boo!
This feels like failing at fingerpainting, but still…What’s going on here and how do I fix it?
What’s happening is you are scaling based on the location of the 3D cursor, and your 3D cursor is not centered. Not familiar with the course, so I don’t if that pivot mode is supposed to be enable or not. If it’s not(which I am assuming), you can switch to ‘Bounding Box Center’ pivot mode by pressing the comma button(,) or clicking the button in your header that looks like a crosshair and choosing ‘Bounding Box Center’ option from the menu.
That’ll do it, yeah. Thanks much!
Must’ve hit the comma while I was typing a decimal.
It is totally worth getting to grips with the various pivot point options, it opens up a much better workflow. I shift between median point, cursor or selected element based on what I need at the time. Active Element is probably the most under-used yet flexible, you can select a loop of points, then simply de-select & re-select one, that then becomes your point for transformations. Simply by shifting the ‘active’ vertex, you can get a lot of control. I’d recommend experimenting with it using a sphere or a column with a few loop cuts. 
