How to rotate pivot to align with object?

[jeffmorris]

How do I rotate pivot to align with object? I tried to use Hierarchy, Affect Pivot Only, and Align to Object, but the pivot is still aligned with the original Reference Coordinate System. The Local or Parent Coordinate System is still aligned with the original Reference Coordinate System.

[Swordslayer]

Align to Object is kinda similar to Reset Pivot, just without moving and rescaling the pivot to the original transform. If the pivot haven't been rotated before, there won't be any offset transform to reset, it won't do anything. What would you like to achieve? You can use the Align tool with all axes checked under Align Orientation when Affect Pivot is active.

[jeffmorris]

I created the 2D drawing in AutoCAD, imported the drawing into 3DS Max, created 3D buildings, and I can't align the pivot to the buildings. I tried to apply material with texture to the buildings but the texture are not applied to the buildings correctly.

[Swordslayer]

Sure, everything is imported the coordsys of the drawing - you can rotate the pivot by the angle but that won't change the object space, only pivot orientation, texture orientation won't be affected. Rotate the mapping gizmo instead.

[jeffmorris]

Rotating the mapping gizmo worked. Any suggestions for textures for buildings?

[Anonymous]

I know I am super late to this thread and surely you have solved this problem. But I think you just have to go to "Local Aligned" mode, that's all. What a way to complicate your life that Swordslayer has...

[Swordslayer]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I know I am super late to this thread and surely you have solved this problem. But I think you just have to go to "Local Aligned" mode, that's all. What a way to complicate your life that @Swordslayer has...

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Excuse me? How does that help in aligning mapping to imported objects, which was the goal here? And yes, it was solved, although not marked as such, he himself said it:

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@Anonymous wrote:

Rotating the mapping gizmo worked. Any suggestions for textures for buildings?

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[Anonymous]

Sorry, I was talking about the first question, where jeffmorris didn't say anything about mapping: "How do I rotate pivot to align with object? I tried to use Hierarchy, Affect Pivot Only, and Align to Object, but the pivot is still aligned with the original Reference Coordinate System. The Local or Parent Coordinate System is still aligned with the original Reference Coordinate System."

And you answered: "Align to Object is kinda similar to Reset Pivot, just without moving and rescaling the pivot to the original transform. If the pivot haven't been rotated before, there won't be any offset transform to reset, it won't do anything. What would you like to achieve? You can use the Align tool with all axes checked under Align Orientation when Affect Pivot is active."

Where I think you should have simply answered: "Go Local Aligned mode"

[Swordslayer]

That's why there's the 'What would you like to achieve?', which turned out to be to align mapping to imported objects. There are many legit scenarios where you really want to align the pivot (especially when rigging or using some modifiers). Local Aligned mode is only useful when manipulating meshes in subobject mode, and if you read the rest of thread, you will find that it wouldn't help at all here... So I still fail to see your point.

[Anonymous]

My point is to say that in the supposed case that the only question in the thread were the first one (many other users have the same problem and ask the question in a similar way), the answer "go Local Aligned mode" would have solved the problem in most cases (and yours would have complicate things unnecessarily in most cases). That's it, I'm just suggesting you to keep things as simple as possible. 

"Local Aligned mode is only useful when manipulating meshes in subobject mode", well, that's not true and you know it. As you know it "attaches" the pivot to the object, so that when you rotate the object, the pivot rotates accordingly. And this way it allows you to move the object accordingly to the orientation you placed it when you rotated it.

Many users take some time to realize it, and that's the other reason why I post this, to help them. That's because the bad decision of Autodesk to set "View" mode as default, instead of "Local Aligned", wich is more useful and logical in most cases. In fact, Maxon agrees with me: in Cinema 4D Global / Object coordinates (Local Aligned in 3ds Max) is set as default.

[Swordslayer · Accepted solution]

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@Anonymous wrote:

My point is to say that in the supposed case that the only question in the thread were the first one (many other users have the same problem and ask the question in a similar way), the answer "go Local Aligned mode" would have solved the problem in most cases (and yours would have complicate things unnecessarily in most cases). That's it, I'm just suggesting you to keep things as simple as possible.

"Local Aligned mode is only useful when manipulating meshes in subobject mode", well, that's not true and you know it. As you know it "attaches" the pivot to the object, so that when you rotate the object, the pivot rotates accordingly. And this way it allows you to move the object accordingly to the orientation you placed it when you rotated it.

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In object mode, Local Aligned (ignoring for a while that it wasn't available in max in 2014) is no different from Local, i.e. depends directly on the pivot orientation. And I finally think I found the source of the confusion, where the original poster and I were talking about pivot (which is a property of a scene node), you are talking about the transform gizmo (which is a manipulator). The original poster tried to align the pivot to the object using 'Align to Object', which is a function that works on the pivot and aligns it to the transform of a picked object. If you picked the same object, it would only change the pivot orientation if the pivot was transformed using the Affect Pivot Only, for example. If not, it doesn't have any effect. That's what I explained in the original answer, together with asking what he's trying to achieve by rotating the pivot and suggestion how to rotate a pivot with the Align tool.

[Anonymous]

"In object mode, Local Aligned (ignoring for a while that it wasn't available in max in 2014) is no different from Local" Ok sorry, you're right, they are pretty the same thing. I'm a user that came to 3ds max from Cinema 4d and I don't know the difference between pivot and transform gizmo. In c4d they just call it "Axis", they don't have two names for the same thing (and I think the program treat it as it was the same thing). Are they really different things in practice? I would apreciate very much if you explain to me the differences between them in practice (and with plain words please). Sorry to bother you. 

PD: I've always wondered why they call it "transform gizmo", because I am spanish and in spanish transform (transformar) only means "to change shape". But now I think that I realized that "transform", in english, also means something like "move" or "change orientation". Is that right? 

[Anonymous]

Oh, I forgot to show you this, just an example of a confused user due to the decision of Autodesk to set "view" mode as default.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php?t-932062.html

[Swordslayer]

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@Anonymous wrote:

"In object mode, Local Aligned (ignoring for a while that it wasn't available in max in 2014) is no different from Local" Ok sorry, you're right, they are pretty the same thing. I'm a user that came to 3ds max from Cinema 4d and I don't know the difference between pivot and transform gizmo. In c4d they just call it "Axis", they don't have two names for the same thing (and I think the program treat it as it was the same thing). Are they really different things in practice? I would apreciate very much if you explain to me the differences between them in practice (and with plain words please). Sorry to bother you. 

PD: I've always wondered why they call it "transform gizmo", because I am spanish and in spanish transform (transformar) only means "to change shape". But now I think that I realized that "transform", in english, also means something like "move" or "change orientation". Is that right? 

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They are different in subObjectMode where Local Aligned works with the transformation of the object. Yes, transform means everything from moving, rotating and scaling to things like shear and skew where the object axes are no longer orthogonal. And pivot is where the transformation information for a node is stored (different packages do that different ways, I'm not familiar with C4D, but for example maya and vred have a different node to hold the transformation instead). Probably the easiest way to become familiar with pivot is to turn on the Affect Pivot Only mode - usually, that's assigned to the Insert key. Visual representation of the pivot appears and you can transform it. Unless you collapse these transformations, you can go to the Hierarchy tab and use Reset Pivot to... well, reset it.

Transform gizmo is just the manipulator that shows you which axis/axes will the node be transformed in if you drag it. Depending on the current coordinate center, it can be shown pretty much anywhere (pivot point, center of selection, world origin, reference object, working pivot) or there can be multiple at the same time. Same with its orientation (respecting pivot, world, working pivot, local by subobject selection, by reference object).

[Swordslayer]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Oh, I forgot to show you this, just an example of a confused user due to the decision of Autodesk to set "view" mode as default.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php?t-932062.html

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You can submit that as an Idea, similar default values have been changed in the course of the last few max releases. Unless someone starts asking for that, the team won't change that. But we're really gettng off-topic here.

[Anonymous]

To be honest I didn't understand most of your explanation, but I guess that the problem is just that I am a self tought user that don't care much about 3d theory and how things work internally in the software. And I assume you are the opposite of me, a much more advanced and professional 3d designer, full of theoretical (and practical) knowledge. I just try each tool to see what it does and use it, don't mind how it works in a theoretical level. In fact, I don't use most of the 3ds max tools, because a lot of them have repeated functions (more or less) or are useless for a non high professional use. And I assume you are the opposite of me, a much more advanced and professional 3d designer, full of theoretical (and practical) knowledge.  

Yes, I know how to use the pivot tools (Affect pivot only, etc), and for me, in practice, pivot and transform gizmo is the same thing (they are represented visually as the same thing), don't need to know all that theory about nodes (at least for the use I make of the program). Anyway, thank you very much for your patience.

[Anonymous]

Thank you a lot for the link! I didn't know that there was a section to submit ideas, and I have a lot of them.

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

I think the confusion comes down to the objects at hand here.  If a dwg shape comes in with rotated parts it doesn't know that that object isn't currently in local as it is.  

If a shape is rotated after creation, then it does.  So, you're both right in a way.  What @Anonymous doesn't know (and it's fine) is that the object can be in local and still have the view axis because it comes in that way.  Example below.

Imported objects in drawings can have rotated parts but still not show as a rotated axis.  What @jeffmorris could do is rotate those parts to be aligned to view, then reset the Xform, then rotate them back and have his local axis again.  

Best Regards,

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Or of course just rotate the pivot, as noted earlier.  Did any of these posts above help you with this issue @jeffmorris?  If not, I'd like to help get you squared away here.  

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

Thank you very much for your clarification!