Use Axis Extension in the Rotate Tool to Accurately Snap Rotations

Photo of Darrin Frankovitz

Instructor Darrin Frankovitz

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  • Duration: 04:41
  • Views: 7743
  • Made with Release: 18
  • Works with Release: 15 and greater

Precisely use snapping with the Rotate Tool.

Learn how to use the "Axis Extension" feature of the rotate tool to accurately and precisely rotate your objects with snapping.

Scene file requires R18 and CV-HDRI library but the technique may be used with R15 Prime and later

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Transcript

- [Darren Frankovitz] In this video, I'm going to show you how to use the Axis Extension feature in the Rotate tool to accurately and precisely snap your object's rotations. The problem I'm having here with this diamond model is that I want to finish modeling it with symmetry, but right now, it's not lined up correctly. The rotation of the geometry is off from the axis orientation. So, you know, I could go in with the Rotate Tool, and I could click and drag and try and rotate it, and you know...that's without snapping. I can turn on snapping. Here, you can see my settings. Vertex, Edge, Polygon, Intersection Workplane. I can go in here, mouse over that axis, but the snapping is all based on where I actually press down with my mouse button, and it's just not that accurate. So, what we need to take advantage of here is the Axis Extension feature. So, how do we do this? Well, we're going to just hold Ctrl or Cmd, mouse over the axis which we want to rotate along, and then simply right-click, a single right-click, and also, release the Cmd or Ctrl, and now, we have this guide colored on the axis which we've moused over, and it is snapping. So, I can snap to this corner point, and now, I can...and I'm just hovering over. And I just mouse over that point and click and drag, and now, you can see this is snapping to the grid line or points. So I can just go right here and release my mouse button, and now, I have a perfect symmetry set up to continue modeling the facets of this diamond model. So, we can also do this with parametric objects in our 3D view onto polygons, so let's check this out. So I have... Let's go over here. So I have this polygon. I want to line up this hemisphere so that it's laying flat along this surface. So, there are, you know, plenty of ways to do this, but let's check it out using the Axis Extension feature. So, I'm going to go to the Sphere, and let's take a look at my snapping settings. Vertex, Edge, Polygon, but I have a Mid Point set up. We'll turn off Workplane. So, I want to move the sphere to the midpoint of this polygon, and it just snapped right there. Perfect. So now, I need to rotate it there, as well. So, basically, I need to rotate it down, and we're going to see a problem in just a second here. So, I'm going to go ahead and Ctrl-click on that axis. I'm going to this point here on the outer edge, click and drag to this point, or we can see that this is actually snapping to the polygon, but when I release, we can see that we actually do this on two axes. So, this is just a two-step process. So, I snap it into its position, I rough it in, and then, I'm going to go here, and if we actually go to the Move Tool, we can see that we basically need to rotate it this way. So, let's...on this axis, Ctrl-click. Go over this point, click and drag, and snap it that way, and so, now, examining the orientation. Perfect, and now we need to go down on the blue axis, so again, Ctrl-right-click, mouse over that same point, and then click and drag there. And now, it is perfectly lined up on the surface of this polygon. So, if you have any questions, please shoot me a message. I hope everyone has fun, and I expect that this will help a lot of people out, and thanks, everyone. Bye. - [Announcer] If you're interested in personalized training or project assistance, visit cineversity1on1.com, and visit cineversity.com for more great tutorials and resources.
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