Origin orientation

[Anonymous]

I'm a litte baffled why, from one operation to the next, it appears that the orientation of the axes switches.    Notice that I did a copy, moving the new copy along the Y axis.  All is well.  But then I did a second copy but this time with an X offset... and it made the copy offset again along the Y axis. ??? [I didn't try in the screencast, but I believe if I had tried to offset a second time in the y direction it would have made the copy "up" [that is along what I think of as the z-axis.].   I'm clearly not understanding something here.

[Anonymous]

It appears that when I edited the post it lost my screencast.. sigh..

[jeff_strater · Accepted solution]

The X, Y, and Z in Move are local to the command, and have no relation to the global or even component X, Y, Z coordinate system.  It depends on what geometry you selected.  In your case, you are doing a window select, so it will be somewhat random as to which face was selected first/last (a little tip here, when the type is set to Body, you don't need to window select to get one body - just click on that body).  The triad will be oriented so that the Z axis is pointing along the surface normal of the geometry you selected.  If you select a Body in the browser, then the coordinate system will be aligned to the owning component of that body.

I agree that this is confusing at times, just because of the X, Y, Z labels being used, and their overloaded meaning.