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Question by KHex · Dec 03, 2011 at 11:20 PM · pivot

About "Pivot/Center" rotation

Just starting unity and not connecting what I see so needed to ask this. Really simple example.

  1. Create empty game object.

  2. Attach sphere as child to empty game object

  3. Move cube somewhere away from the game object which is still set at 0,0,0

  4. Click on sphere and rotate in local. Rotation works great.

  5. Click on "Pivot" expecting the pivot to jump back to 0,0,0 (the location of the empty game object) but the rotation axis surround the sphere just like it was still in global

With a sphere and a cube

  1. Create empty G.O.

  2. Attatch sphere and cube to G.O.

  3. Move objects away

  4. With empty G.O. selected, set it to pivot and it seems like a point in space is the average position between the sphere and cube. What is happening here?

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Answer by syclamoth · Dec 03, 2011 at 11:57 PM

The confusion here, is that it's not choosing between global and local pivots at all!

They're actually two different buttons.

There is one button, the 'pivot / center' button, which changes the pivot point that you are rotating objects around from the object's pivot, to the centre of the object and all its children's bounding boxes.

The other button, the 'Global / Local' button, changes the space in which an object is rotated / moved / scaled. In 'Global' space, it always aligns to the global xyz axes, in 'Local' space it aligns to the object itself (which is different if something higher in the transform hierarchy has rotated but not the object itself).

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avatar image KHex · Dec 04, 2011 at 12:07 PM 0
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Heh was late last night so I edited title, understand that they are two separate things.

So basically, the pivot/center button is more from a "top-down" perspective. In my $$anonymous$$d, it would make more sense to select the child and then when "Pivot" versus "Center" is chosen, the "Pivot" should jump back to the parent. However, in Unity, it seems like you first dictate to the parent how its children should be rotated based on if you click "Pivot" or "Center". Thus, the end result by choosing "Pivot" is always an average to which the parent/child can rotate around versus the "Center" which is says that children can orbit the parent.

Is what I said correct?

avatar image syclamoth · Dec 05, 2011 at 03:58 AM 1
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No, that's not right at all- when you select a child, pivot is always the child. When you select center, it's the centre of the object and all its children. If you do your rotations in code, they always use pivot mode, unless you write some special functions for emulating centre pivot point rotations.

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