Maya Local Rotation?

Mayalicious

Hello guys. I need to rotate a freeze transformed mesh around an off axis object. I can do this with a custom mel script called LocalTools for Maya. Here you can see;



But my question is how can i do this process without using a custom mel script? We are in Maya 2014 and i dont want to believe that maya doesnt contain a tool for this. What i am missing?



Thank you.

Fingus

If you hold down the W key and left click you will get a radial marking menu with move tool options. One of them is Axis, and in there are tools for changing the axis. In your case the ones that align the axis to the normal of a face/edge/vertex would probably do the trick.

Mayalicious

No it does not work. W is for move. Anyway if i select axis/edge or vertex etc. it still doesnt work (Wrong axix)

Bartalon

Fingus wrote: »

If you hold down the W key and left click you will get a radial marking menu with move tool options. One of them is Axis, and in there are tools for changing the axis. In your case the ones that align the axis to the normal of a face/edge/vertex would probably do the trick.

This only works for Move and Scale; the Rotate tool has no such alignment capabilities.

Generally when I'm working off-axis I will group the objects I am working on and freeze the transforms of the group, which will retain the transformation values of the children and allow local rotation to still work. I only freeze transforms of a mesh at the end of modeling to avoid such issues.

haiddasalami

Yeah I dont think you can do this unless you go to the local rotation axis and manually set it. Might be able to orient constraint it with a locator. What i do is have a seprate button for freeze transform with scale, rotate and transform and one all in one

Fingus

Well that's a bunch of horseshit. Didn't realize it didn't work on rotate.

I suppose what you could do is to create a cube primitive and use the Snap Together Tool to snap the mesh to one side so it will be perfectly aligned along the axis. Then Freeze Transform and reposition it manually. It's not perfect, but it should do the trick.

Deadly Nightshade

This is a common problem and you pretty much have to rely on external scripts and/or learn when you should freeze things or not. What I usually do if I freeze something I shouldn't had, is to just rotate the mesh back to it's original position and freeze it there, then rotate back.

Brygelsmack

Sorry to bump this, but it's unnecessary to create a new thread when there's already a thread.

Just curious how you run the HKLocalTools mentioned in the OP? Nothing happens when I run the script in the script editor. Is it compatible with 2014?