[chedda]

A little bit basic and i'm quite embarrassed, how do i move the anchor point of an object ? For example i am making libraries of furniture at the moment, i want the origin/anchor point of a chair to be in the centre at the bottom. Is there a shortcut to place this ? Or do i have to relocate it manually somehow ? When i say anchor point i mean the three coloured axes which appear when i select the move icon.Many thanks in advance.

[Half Life]

There is an Icon on the top bar that will switch between transforming the object or the pivot point... it's right next to the scale icon.

Also you can do this more precisely through the Object Parameters>Coordinates Panel via the column of fields labeled "Pivot" for position and rotation.

Best,
Jason.

[ricardo]

You can also press the 'center' button under the pivot coordinates, it will bring it to the obect's bounding box center. You can then set Z to 0

EDIT I mean Y=0, studio is Y up.

[Nova66]

EDIT I mean Y=0, studio is Y up.

Sorry for going off topic but I'm the same, I just cant get used to 'Y' being the up direction. It would be so good if there was a global setting to make 'Z' the up direction within Maxwell Studio.

Andrew.

[chedda]

Oh right that complicates matters, why was this strange configuration chosen ? I thought x,y,z was international or does maxwell have it's own dimension !

[Mihnea Balta]

Unfortunately there is no standard here. Y up feels more natural when you build 3D software because usually you think of the camera as looking forward. When you project from 3D to 2D you want to be left with X and Y, so Z has to be depth. The "competing" system feels more natural if you're usually looking at your models from above, in which case Z will be height, but projecting will be weird because Z will become Y.

Just to make things more confusing, some people also enjoy changing the chirality (or handness) of the coordinate system. When asked to draw an axis triad on a piece of paper, most people will draw depth as coming out of the paper, but some software has it going the other way. This is because with depth sticking out, only objects with negative depth coordinates (in camera space) are visible. This horrified some programmers so they put the depth axis going into the paper (or screen, or whatever) so that positive depth is visible, which in their view makes the world a much better place.

In reality it makes no difference which permutation you pick. I wish everybody would just stick to one axis layout and get over it. Converting between layouts is a major pain and will always lead to bugs because you always forget to do it somewhere, or do it twice, or something. There should be some kind of math Gestapo which throws people in jail when they decide to use a different axis layout compared to everybody else because they think it's better for some made-up reason (like positive depth being much better than negative depth). That way we'd have one layout and moving geometry from one program to another would go much smoother. Unfortunately there's no math Gestapo, so Max has Z going up, Maya has Y going up (with an option to use Z up which probably breaks every exporter and dynamics plug-in out there), Lightwave has Z going inside the screen and so on. I bet that if you look hard enough, you'll find a program which has X going down and Z going to the left or something like that.

PS: I once saw a teacher use X as depth. I felt like strangling him.

[brodie_geers]

Yes, please choose a rational standard and stick to it. That way we, in the United States, can finally choose a much more irrational opposing system which no reasonable country will adopt.

I'm backing an octagonal system with directions b, ~, i, l, 1, o, 0, and

-Brodie