Aligning object axis a 2 minute tutorial
 

I promised this a video a while back and finally captured it.

In maya when one object is the child of another object and you then freeze the child objects transforms the child inherits the object-axis of the parent.

This can be very handy when you have some point you want to rotate, scale, or translate about an axis but the local, object, and world axises are not cooperating.

I saw this trick in a video tutorial a long time ago and man it comes in very handy. Freeze transform after parenting is the trick and I always forget that and then go crazy for hours trying to figure out why I can't get the target object to inherit the parent objects object-axis. I then have to dig out the tutorial and search for the trick.

I finally decided to screen capture it for myself so I have a permanant reference.

This is a link to that video I made. It is in .swf format so you will need the flash player.

http://home.comcast.net/~rmulawa/ali...lign_axis.html

I hope some of you will find it helpful.

Rick M

NOTE:

4/28/2007
There is a small but critial error in one of the captions in the video. The order of selection is important when parenting. You select the thing to be the parent LAST. The video text has the selection order backwards but the video clearly shows the correct order.