🧵 Rotation around specific, non cardinal axis.
Anonymous at Wed, 20 Jul 2022 02:08:41 UTC No. 909071
I'm using blender for 3d modeling with the hope of 3d printing. Its been going well, but there's one thing I can't figure out how to do. I've checked around online and in tutorials but nothing I found was quite what I want or would work.
I have a peg and I have a curved piece that goes on that peg. I want to rotate the curved piece around on that peg in a way that mimics the way it would when printed. The peg isn't set to be directly on x,y, or z axis so it would need to rotate around a non-cardinal direction, locked to a specific piece of geometry.
The closest I've gotten is manually placing the 3d cursor and using it as origin but that seems like a slapdash solution and requires constantly repositioning the cursor to test different pieces. I'm thinking maybe the solution lies in armatures and bones but I'm totally inexperienced with them since I've used blender only for modeling not animating.
Anonymous at Wed, 20 Jul 2022 02:14:08 UTC No. 909072
Set the 3d cursor to where you need it on the peg. And then set the origin of your curved piece to the 3d cursor.
Anonymous at Wed, 20 Jul 2022 02:53:24 UTC No. 909074
>>909072
Like I said in the post, thats the way I've been doing it. But that requires me to precisely place it in the center of the peg, and when I have multiple pieces it requires me to do that over and over again to check them. Is there some other way?
Anonymous at Wed, 20 Jul 2022 03:14:07 UTC No. 909076
>>909074
Yes, using bone constraint
The process described by anon 1 is not really difficult or tedious though- shift+s is handy- you can select an edge loop or a face and snap the cursor there- it snaps to the center of selected. keeping the objects' local axis aligned with the object will be key for this approach- You will press R on the object and press the axis key twice (for example: R, Z, Z) to switch to local pivot on the objects Z. Same works for translation and scale