Subtitles of the Movie

Okay, now we're going to talk about pivot points. And I'm going to illustrate this first by creating a polygon cone, and I'm going to grab one of these off of the shelf. Instruction here is: Drag the base on the grid and pull up for height. I'm going to hit five on the keyboard, send this into shaded mode. Take a look at this when I switch to the Rotate tool, and you can get this either by pressing E on the keyboard or by clicking on the Rotate tool icon over in the toolbar. When I rotate this object the rotation occurs around a central axis called the pivot point. Imagine if this were a bell and I wanted to rotate it from the very tip here. We need a way to adjust the placement of that pivot point. I'm going to switch to a front view and I'll turn off the display of the grid here by clicking on Show Grid. Let me close that window. Now when I want to move the pivot point, I have two options. The one I like to use it press the D key, so I'm going to hold down D, as in David, and when I hold D, you'll see that the rotate manipulator switches to something that looks like the Move tool. As I drag that manipulator I'm changing the placement of that pivot point. And another way to do this is by pressing the Insert key on your keyboard. That toggles you in and out of the pivot tool, but I prefer D just because it's right there by your left hand. So now that I've moved the pivot point, I can grab this Rotate tool handle and start swinging the object like it's a bell. Let me go ahead and undo that movement, and I'll switch to the perspective view again and turn my grid back on. Another use for switching the pivot point is the scaling of an object. So let me create a cube again. I'm going to go up to the polygon cube on my polygon shelf and drag out something that's about the proportion of a door. Now not only does the rotate seem strange on this door with the default pivot point, but scaling this, if I'm trying to do any sort of modeling, is going to be a bit haphazard. If I switch to the front view here, you can see that the Scale tool also responds to that pivot point. So right now, if I scale this out, I'm knocking into that cone, and imagine now that I'm modeling and I just want to push the right side out. Well if I take my D key again and move the pivot point off to the side where the hinge would be on the door. When I start scaling this object, it respects that pivot point and starts pushing away from or toward that position. You can see the same is true for scaling on the Y or vertical axis. If I want to be able to scale this thing up and down but leave the base on the floor, I'm going to switch again to my Move tool, holding the D key, drag down to the bottom corner, and now when I scale, I can squish this thing down in height. So this is a really useful shortcut when you're modeling beside being a good general practice for setting up an object for animation.