Hi all,
while on a rigging job, I had to deal with the rotate manipulator more than I do on average, and I noticed that it doesn’t respond as I’d expect, mainly when I’m wanna rotate on an axis. When I click one of the colourful circles to rotate it, I hardly ever get the axix I’d expect to be constrained working. It appears to me as if Blender was a sort of interpolating the probability of the wanted axis based on the view angle because whe I play with the view a bit I finally get it working, but it’s slowing me down, and also slightly driving mne mad. Is there anything I could do about this, to get it work? Or is it a correct behavior?
I haven’t used to 3D Manipulator for a while now.
I found it obstructs the view to much.
But I just tested it and there’s no problems at all.
Maybe it’s the orietation it’s set at. (Global/Local/Normal/View)
So try those out.
Maybe the computer was just lagging.
You shouldn’t have subsurf on when animating, maybe that was the cause of the problem?
I definitely get the rotation on the normal axis, which is what I want, I just have problems with selecting the axis i want to constrain the rotation to. I have no problems with lagging, just with making Blender rotate the bone on the axis I want it to, no on an axis blender thinks I want to use.
It’s really obstructing the view anyway, but is there any orher way to constrain a normal axis of a bone while rotating? I mean something like pressing “X”, but to make it normal?
I don’t know how you’d make it normal, but yes, you can press x/y/z to rotate on those axis.
Just press X (or Y, or Z) twice to go to local (or if you’re animating bones, normal) constrained rotation. You can also hit r a second time to go to trackball rotation, which can be handy for quick and general rotation placements.
I agree with Cire792… Your Transform Orientation is in the wrong mode…
Another thing to check: Is your rotation/scaling pivot set to an unwanted mode? I typically use the 3D cursor as my pivot in my workflow, but I sometimes use the other modes. The problems as you describe them sounds like what I see when I have the wrong pivot mode selected.
Also like Cire792, I haven’t used the on-screen translate/rotate/scale manipulator since my very early days of Blender.
use:
‘G’ to Grab (translate),
‘R’ to Rotate,
‘S’ to Scale,
…each followed by ‘X’, ‘Y’, or ‘Z’ to constrain along an axis, and/or by numeric input to provide exact values for the transformation. Do yourself a favor and hit that little finger-pointing hand icon in the 3D View header and say goodbye to the 3D manipulator forever.
Thanks to you all for replies, but I assure you that I have all the pivot settings and so on precisely as I want them to be. I use the manipulator only when I need some manipulations aligned to normal axes, like rotating bones. Thanks to Captain Oblivion for the keys, now I can get rid of the manipulator (I hope). But the Rotate manipulator is still weird…