Subtitles of the Movie

Let's take another look at the first three tools in our Tool Palette. They are: Translation, or a position manipulator; Rotation; and Scale. Let's select our Gear model from the Project List. As I switch between these three tools, you can see how my Controller changes. The Translation Tool works very much like my Axes widget I showed you earlier. We see all three axes as straight arrows. If I pick any of these arrows and drag, my movement is constrained along that axis. If I pick the box in the middle then I can move the Gear anywhere I'd like. The Rotation Tool gives me four Controller Rings, one each for rotating around an axis: green for Y; red for X; and blue for Z rotation. But there is also a light blue ring, which allows me to rotate the model perpendicular to the Window I'm looking through, including the Camera View. Let's look at the Gear's Info Window. In the X1 tab I'm going to zero out the values for all three axes, and let's select that blue ring again. In order for the Gear to appear to be rotating perpendicular to the Camera, Animator has to change Rotation Values for all three axes. You can also click anywhere inside the rings without touching the rings and have free rotation like you were spinning a ball. The Scale Tool shows a different Controller. If you click any of the colored balls you can scale the model non-uniformly along that axis. Clicking on the box in the center scales uniformly. One thing about positioning your model. If you find that you're having trouble moving your model, like your model is jumping around instead of freely moving, as we see here, then check to see if you have your Caps Lock key pressed on your computer's keyboard. If the Caps Lock key is pressed, then that means snapping to the World Grid is enabled. You can also toggle snapping on or off through this tool in the Tool Bar. If you see this little blue check mark, then snapping is on. You can also change how the Snapping Grid works by going into Animator's Preferences here in the Menu Bar and then click on the tab Grid and Scale. Go to the fields under Snapping Grid, and change the Scale values to something very small. Let's change it to zero point 1, then click OK, and now even though Snapping Grid is enabled the values are so small that snapping is almost negligible.