How to center pivot on object / mirror objects

[Anonymous]

New Maya LT user here, completly confused about the interface, and trying to use Maya LT for something specific I couldn't get done in Blender...

Backstory is: Longtime 3D Coat and blender user, I have created a hard surface sculpt in 3D Coat containing multiple objects, that I needed to correct the pivot points of all the objects and duplicate/mirror some objects.

While mirroring and pivot correction works great in Blender, the fact that blender cannont support vertex normals was the deal breaker for me. So I am searching for a better 3D Package and I have wanted to give Maya LT as spin for a long time.

I have installed it and started to get the hang of the interface, but now I am stuck on 4 points:

1) no space navigator support for Maya LT? Really? Even the most obscure 3D programs support it nowadays, but the lite version of one of Autodesk big 2 does not? That is an almost-dealbreaker for me, I might suck it up for quick corrections but not for longer modelling sessions, the Space Navigator is that essential to me. Please tell me there is a way to get Space Navigator support in Maya LT!

2) How to correct pivot points? I have learned how to do freehand corrections, but what I am really interested in is:

- moving the pivot point to the center of an object

- moving the pivot point to a 3D cursor (so the pivot can be centeret on the same pivot point as the one that was moved to the center of another object).

4) How to move an object to a point in space (like the origin point) without having to mess around with snap to grid and stuff like that? I would like to be able to type in values (like 0,0,0).

5) Mirroring of objects... Blender allows to do that kind-of easy with the mirror modifier. You can even select which object should be the mirroring center, so that you can mirror stuff that is off axis. This is less important as soon as the pivot correction and moving objects to the center works fine, still, I don't understand how to mirror stuff in Maya LT. All the examples were hard to understand for me.

Thanks for any help in advance!

Gian-Reto

[Anonymous]

After some googling and experimenting I found the answers to question 2 and 3... so that part has been solved.

What I sadly had to find out regarding mirroring objects is that there does not seem to be a "mirror object" option anywhere in Maya LT.

"Duplicate special" with a scaling of -1 does NOT work for me as it breaks normals and I haven't found a way to fix it (as it seems to mess up normals for good when imported later into unity 3D... same way that normals gets messed up if you do the same thing in Unity).

Is there a way to replicate the way the mirror modifier in Blender (and I guess also in 3DS Max) works in Maya LT? Or is there a tried and tested way to fix the normals (reversing them didn't work for me, then the normals are actually reversed in Unity)? It seems the face normals are not affected, seems to be only affecting some vertex normals for some reason. So I am a little bit confused why this happens, and how to fix it.