let's get started on movement what's up i'm jonathan and welcome to Maker tales
where i'm sharing my Maker journey to help you go further in yours so don't forget to
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this video is all about precision movement and blender first we're going to understand what
blender movement is like within object and edit mode and then we're going to understand how to do
precision movement easily within blender once again starting on a fresh new blender
file let's go ahead and do movement this is going to be the fundamentals of movement also
some advanced movement in blender and my favorite type of movement which is cad transforms movement
now i am going to be doing something a little bit different this whole topic is going to be split up
into three videos as it's a mammoth topic we're going to be exploring it in object mode in edit
mode and then using cad transforms in both object and edit mode so let's go ahead and let's dive
straight into object mode so we're going to select everything we're going to delete it and then we're
going to create our own cube that is going to be exactly one millimeter okay now that we have
a size reference here let's go ahead and move our origin point to this vertex here i'm sure you can
remember this from the last video so we're going to go vertex snapping using our 3d cursor snap
it down there right click set origin origin to 3d cursor and this here is the first type of movement
if we hit n we open our menu here we could also just toggle it back and forth there and
here you can see we have our location rotation scale and dimensions let's go from the top down
so location let's just click drag down and that lets you select everything and let's put in zero
and that there is how we do some exact placement so we can go on the y we can
hit one and it moves it one on the y we can go on the x and put in minus 0.8 and it moves it
minus 0.8 on the x-axis brilliant so we also have rotation and as you can gather
that's exactly what it's going to do as you've realized it's using the origin point as the
pivot point and the origin is going to be the origin for movement for rotation for scale
you name it it's all of it anyway let's put this back to zero now and let's bring it back to zero
let's talk about scale and dimensions for a moment
so yes i'm not saying you can't change scale and i'm not saying you can't use the dimensions here
i'm just saying be aware of what i'm about to say blender wants your objects to be at one scale
because in the future we're going to be using something called modifiers
and modifiers are incredibly powerful but they are very sensitive to scale they're sensitive to a
few other things but we'll cover those later on so let's say we wanted this cube to be a three by 1.5
brilliant now our scale is broken how do we fix this well to do that we need to apply the scale
to our object and what we're doing is going to go control a this brings up our apply menu and
then let's hit scale don't apply all transforms and the rest because that's going to put you in a
real model later on so let's just go ahead and put it for scale and you'll see that our scale is now
down to one and our dimensions have stayed okay let's go ahead and let's put all these dimensions
back to one and then here let's apply our scale once again okay for all of those of you that are
wondering okay where's all these shortcuts coming from i'm never going to learn them
they're going to be down in the description i'm working on a very clear way of showing all the
shortcuts plus remember that everything here that i'm talking about is going to be in these menus
there's nothing that's hidden it's all there and it's very easy and you also have the space bar
that we set up right at the beginning to be your search menu so if you wanted you could go ahead
and put in scale and then you'll find scale apply brilliant there it is just be aware
it's all there for you okay so that there is how to use the transform menu
let me show you the tools then i'm sure you've seen them on the left hand side here
we have our move tool rotate tool our scale tool and transform tool so let's click our cube
let's hit our move tool and it brings up this lovely little gizmo it's very self-explanatory
we have the axis constraints plane constraints you can click an axis put in a number
and that's it done brilliant so let's set that all back to zero for now let's do the same
for rotation rotation we have our rotation here we have our rotation there and we can put in a number
45 and that's it done okay now you might see this white ring the outer white ring is for
viewport style movement so if you wanted to move along your viewport looking angle that's where
this is going to happen and that is the same for movement as well you have this free move
here that's going to move it sort of perpendicular to your viewports but it can be a little bit
haphazard as well so just be aware of that and now we have scale scales a little bit different again
yes we have our plane we have this plane here too and we have our axis scaling perfect
okay but scale has something a little bit different
over here it's a drop down and we have something called the scale cage just be wary if you're going
to be using the scale cage because the scale cage moves the origin point with the scaling
so that can be quite counter-intuitive when it comes to scaling and depending where
you're scaling from because where you're scaling your origin point is going to no longer be
as concrete as you might be expecting for precision modeling okay now we've looked
at all the tools the transform is just all of them at once and just be accurate where you're clicking
now i want to pose a question first this is a lot of clicking for these and second
is when we have a rotation let's say we went here and put in 45 degrees and i want
to go in that direction how do i do that well first let's cover the shortcuts the shortcuts
because this is blender are needed because that's how we do an efficient workflow so we're going to
move an object and that's by grabbing it and we're going to do that with g you grab an object to move
and we can constrain that on the y on the x and the z just like normal we can go
y five and it's exactly like the duplication movement that we've been working with
now rotating is the same again it's using the pivot point keep that in mind always and let's
go ahead and put a 45 on that and now we have our scaling let's plot this back to our normal scaling
and let's do an s for scale and you can see we have our scaling here we can also do constrained
scales on the y and on the x and on the z okay brilliant now i'm wanting to move this in that
direction how do i do that i'm just going to do our shortcut w to bring the selection box
and i want you to be aware of something when we're moving we are moving on something called
the global axis as you can see the big green line is the global
y axis and this is the global x-axis and we have the global z-axis if you ever want to bring up the
z-axis you can go over here to your overlays and show it right there but there's no need to okay
so why are you telling me about this global well this object has been rotated 45 degrees so if it
had a little smiley face right here it's facing this way so that means that locally for the cube
the y should be in that direction and that's exactly it we have a local axis here
on our transform orientations and if we click local there
and now we were go to our move tool you can see that it's moved in that direction
now if we go global it snaps to the global okay so shortcut wise how does that look so if we go
let's go w then let's go g if we go y okay it's still on the y uh okay so let's
go here and put local if we go back go g we go y it's moving on the y direction but now
wanting to go back to the global how do i do that i can't click that right now
well there's actually a very easy way there's no need to go up here and keep changing this
i work just in the global and to do this we're going to click our cube we're going to hit g
to move it we're going to hit y once and now to move it into its local we hit y once again
and now it's in its local constraint if you hit y once again it's going to be free flow
floating again it's just sort of cancelled the constraints so we can do the same for the x we can
hit x once again and it's going to move on its own x-axis and this is completely the same no matter
how you have your orientation so if we were to put in another rotation here on its x-axis
oh wait one second that's not the x-axis that i'm talking about i want to move on its own x axis
by just going on its own local x axis we can go 45 degrees and now we can move in a 45 degree angle
upwards by going g y y and there we have it that is how to use blender's default constraints okay
so with that now set let's set everything back to zero here so we can explore some more things
now that we have a grasp on all of our tools let's go ahead and look into one other menu so another
menu that's used a lot with movement is this one right here which is the transform pivot point
now it can sound a bit weird but there are multiple pivot points within blender
yes objects have their own designated pivot point but if we were to duplicate this and constrain
it on the y let's move it by two millimeters and now we were to go ahead and select both of these
they both have origin points but what's going to happen now when i do a rotation
oh okay that's a little bit counter-intuitive how am i going to do a perfect rotation here that
doesn't quite make sense well that's where this menu comes in it comes in we have multiple things
selected so if we were to go active elements well we now know that this is our active element
so if we did a rotation now it's going to use the pivot point of the active element
to influence the whole selection okay great so we've understood that so what's going on with this
individual origins then like does that mean every single origin they will affect
that's basically it you can use the origin point wherever it is on other objects to influence
its own object and that there is how to do that okay let's take a look at one other one here we
have a 3d cursor you can use the 3d cursor as another point yes you can in fact what
we can go ahead and do is let's go ahead and move our 3d cursor to i don't know let's say
let's go into our view here of the 3d cursor let's set its location to zero its rotation to zero
and now let's set its z-axis here to yeah let's say two so now with our 3d cursor selected it's
going to ignore those origin points and use the 3d cursor as the origin point so as you can see
the origin point is a very powerful tool within blender that can be defined in many different ways
okay lastly i want to cover a little something extra which doesn't really have to do with
precision modeling but it has to do with blender so let's go ahead let's create a cube
and we're just going to be creating a matrix of cubes here i'm not going to show you a quick way
of doing this i just want you to play around here and make yourself a whole bunch of cubes feel free
to do what i'm doing here but i very much want you to feel comfortable duplicating constraining
using the move tool here to really be able to create what i'm creating right here so all i'm
doing is duplicating constraining putting a numerical input and then just hitting enter so
duplicate constrain numerical and now i want to duplicate this last row right here
shift d x to there okay now why have i done this it's because i want to show you a cool thing
that blender has which is called proportional editing now we have almost covered everything
up here what's left is this one here proportional editing is not precision based in the slightest
but it is definitely fun to play with so i'm going to go ahead and set this to medium point
and now when we turn on proportional editing with this right there and we go ahead and do a g
to grab and move you can see there's this circle that's appeared so let's constrain this on the z
and now if you scroll upwards
we're sorry downwards upwards just scroll you will see that this creates
a proportional editing field around the object that you have so this is a very fun thing to do
within blender to really be able to create some incredibly interesting shapes and yes
this does work over in edit mode which i'm sure i'll cover later on when we're covering movement
within edit mode but i just wanted to show you all the types of movement that we have here
that is default blender movement before we go into anything else and of course to turn
off proportional editing just click this again and that is now proportional editing turned off
well done through getting that crazy video yes it's probably one of the trickier ones so far
but it's one of the crucial ingredients when it comes to modeling within blender and even more so
for precision modeling if you want a little extra stick to the end a huge thank you to my patrons
you guys are absolutely awesome and it's the real reason i can do things like this
and if you're enjoying what i'm doing here and think that i'm worthy of your support i would love
to see you there too don't forget that we do have a discord down in the description thank you for
watching keep making and let the quest continue down in the description is this movement object
obstacle course to make sure you really understand all the principles that we've just covered some of
these will be quite tricky so there is also a solution video down in the description