orientation

Support Basics & Interface
#1

hi all,

Im starting to get the hang of blender, mesh modeling, materials ,textures etc.

My problem is orientation of objects Im working on.
Are there any good tutorials on this subject of basic alignment and orientation of objects on the grid?
Thx

#2
  1. Always add objects from an orthographic view (orthographic? NUM7 NUM1 NUM3) except a few cases.
  2. Use the CTRL key while rotating, scaling and translating to “snap to grid.” 3. Use CTRL + SHIFT to make those grid steps smaller (SHIFT by itself allows small movements).
  3. Try to scale meshes (in edit mode) rather than objects (in object mode).
    4.5. Try to rotate and translate objects into your scene in object rather than edit mode.
  4. If you do end up with a “right angled” mesh whose rotation isn’t aligned to the global grid, try using the NUM* key to align the viewport to the object’s local coordinates (NUM8, 4, 6, 2 work well with this to rotate the viewport). Once you’ve got the viewport aligned to the object, scaling, translating, and rotating along the object’s local axis can be called by pressing the axis key (X, Y, or Z) twice.

Honestly, I don’t know if some of that’s (4, 4.5) the right thing to do, but it’s helped me on occasion.

#3

Worth mentioning, you can put objects into ‘local’ rather than ‘global’, if you find editing axes not suitable. Also, use the widgets to align,scale and rotate.