How to zero an object's default position?

john_antkowiak

So the first answers that will come to everyone's mind aren't the ones I'm looking for. I've seen what I'm about to describe most often in commercial Environments sets, where the items in an environment can be loaded pre-propped to the location where they go in the scene - on a shelf on the far wall, for example. Or, they can be loaded separately as zeroed objects that will load at 0, 0, 0. Well... I want to do that with a prop that doesn't have a zero option. It's a tin cup from one of the Shenandoah sets. How do I load it and zero the position/rotation defaults so it can sit flat on a surface instead of hanging by the handle? I could export it to an .obj file, but I'm not sure how to wipe its orientation values that way either...

Richard Haseltine

Add something, like a Plane Prmitive, at the origin, select it then the prop, and use the Align pane to centre on X and Z and align bottoms on Y - that should place it at the origin, at ground level. Save as a Scene Subset.

john_antkowiak

Hi, Richard. Yes, I had already tried that but as you can see if you look closely, it didn't zero the rotation. This is the planimetric view so you can't see the plane. but the cup touches at one end and not the other. So I'm trying to rotate it manually until the bottom of the cup sits flat like if, say, you wanted to fill the cup with coffee  lol.... And if I can undo any rotation the PA gave it, maybe I can undo the position as well. So I thought I'd post the question here.

Richard Haseltine

Ah, I don't think there is a tool to zero rotations - not sure how one would work as a general case.

barbult

I think V3Digitimes has a product that would help with this. Face To Face And Virtual Origins

It doesn't change the object's actual origin, but it moves the object into place against a target object and creates a "virtual origin" that allows you to easily rotate the object around the polygon face that you selected as the face to be moved to the target. I use V3DF2F 01 Create Target script to create a target on one polygon on the rim of a bowl. Then I selected a polygon on the bottom of a fork handle and apply V3DF2F 02 Translate and Turn Full script. It moves the fork handle flush with the bowl rim Then I manually rotate the virtual origin to make the tines of the fork touch the bottom of the bowl. The fork I started with was positioned up in the air and rotated into the position for a character's right hand to hold it. Now it rests nicely in the bowl. Before I got Face To Face, positioning something like that was hard for me. In your case, you could create the virtual origin on one end of the cup and rotate around that point to make the other edge touch the ground. It is still a manual rotation, though.

john_antkowiak

Thank you, Barbult, that's an interesting possibility. If there's no way to do this through the Joint Editor or Geometry Editor or other tools I never learned to use, I might also reach out to the horse's mouth as it were) and see if the vendor can provide some information about the object's rotation values.  : )