All right, let's take a look at the pivot point menu that we've got down here as well
as the 3D manipulator area and its orientation.
So in here we've got an option to be able to switch from the default median point to
any of these other options.
Now the median point isn't properly expressed really with this selection because we've just
got this object and so the median point of this single object happens to be its origin
point but if we were to shift and right select, so hitting the right mouse button with shift
is going to add to our selection and now you can see that the pivot point has shifted to
the average point between the two origins of these two objects which is right there.
Now this object by the way has now become the active element and the active element
is usually the last selected object which we can see with this lighter orange outline.
Now that's useful to us because we can switch our pivot point to be the active element and
now you can see that it's going to jump to that.
If I shift right select this plane now, we've switched that to be the active object, that's
now the active element and that's useful for other things in Blender by the way as well
because if we were to just change the location x value of this one, in fact let's just change
the y value some more, you can see that it's only altering this active plane object, it's
not altering this cube object as well whereas if we were to right select on here and then
copy to selected, it's going to copy from the active element to the selected elements
so that's kind of a useful thing to keep in mind.
Also there's several other options where we can copy settings of the active element to
all the other selected objects so it's kind of like a useful hierarchy to have in mind.
So let's switch over to the 3D cursor as a pivot point which we've kind of touched on
before, I'm going to hit 7 on the numpad just to switch to top orthographic and now this
means if I press R, I can rotate and we're rotating around the pivot point of course
so the pivot point is now the 3D cursor so we can kind of change that to be whatever
we want it to be but for now let's just switch it back to the average which is the
median point and then press R again and you can see we're rotating around the view of
the camera here of course which is why it might be simpler just to move from the top
orthographic and you can see that that's rotating around the median point.
One other thing about this pivot point menu is it's coupled with this option towards the
side, if I press S now to scale we can see that the objects are getting larger, if we
actually enable this option it's not going to resize the objects it's merely going to
scale away from the pivot point so you can see that it's kind of going to explode out
from that median point.
I'm going to disable that option for now though and then we'll look over this area for the
manipulator, currently on screen we can see the manipulator, we can see that it's a translation
and we've touched on it a little bit, we've grabbed this plane and just moved it out by
clicking on the green Y axis and you can see that we can click on this first button
to basically hide it and you can do that with the control space key as well, we can toggle
on and off the manipulator with the control space key.
Then we've got these three icons, so the first one is for translation, this curve line here
is for the rotation gizmo and then this final one here is for the scaling so what we can
do is we can click on an axis and we can scale it along the X axis in this case, I'm
just going to hit control Z to undo that, something else that we can do is shift select
on them all and we can see them all there like that and then I'm just going to from
the top view again press R to rotate and then middle click and drag out of that view just
to rotate myself down here and then I'm going to switch from global to local and you can
see the axis sort of all change for the manipulator there because we've rotated the local axis
of the plane or of course rotated along with it and then we've got some other options here
that we will come to later, so I'm going to switch that back to global just for simplicity
in fact let's undo the rotation as well with control Z, so a couple of other things that
we can do with this is well a first point is that what we can't do is use any hotkeys
to switch between the currently selected manipulator type, there's a kind of another paradigm in
blender for which to sort of move things around and for that we would just simply press on
the G key to grab or translate really and then R to rotate and then S to scale and what we can
do is rather than clicking on the axes here what we could do is sort of specify so we can press G
and then we can press Y to lock it along the Y axis and then we can sort of move it to say about
here and then just left click to confirm or what we can do is press just duplicate that again with
G and then Y that same sort of action we can actually key in a specific amount so we can key
in say negative 3 and that's going to move it exactly negative 3 blender units and you can
kind of see down in the bottom of the tool shelf the operation that we've just done you can see
that we've got negative 3 which has been done on the Y axis and you can see it was constrained
along the Y axis and then some of the details as well so let's press we can also press F6 and
you'll find that at the location of the cursor in the 3d view and also just in case you hadn't
spotted it let's just do that again and left click on the Y axis of the manipulator and take a look
in the 3d headers header bar all the information has obviously gone down here and we're just left
with some stuff in the bottom left which is to do with the distance that we're moving and you
can see that we're on a global orientation there and so what we can do is we can press G and then
X to constrain on the X axis if we press X again we've switched instead of it being the global
with it switched to the local so let's just rotate around the Z axis a little bit and then
I'm going to left click to confirm that and then I'm going to press G and then Y to constrain on
the Y axis but Y again and then we're going to shift to the local axis and then where I'm going
to say five units and you can see it's kind of come over to here now so you can see that that
can be quite a useful way of being able to specify which way you want to get around the viewport
so also what you can do is we can shift select on an axis to lock it so we can't now move it on
the Z axis because we shift selecting it and you can see it instead constrains along the X and Y
axis so it's not moving up and down now which is quite handy in a lot of translations and we can
do that with any of the axes so I can shift select on that one as well and we can see we've
locked it that distance instead as though we're on a kind of a flat wall that we want to move this
plane along somehow I'm just going to undo that with control Z though and let's talk about once
we've selected and moved we can then hit shift and then we're going to sort of get a much finer
control so I have to move the mouse a lot more to get it to go a further distance basically