Universal Tool XYZ thingy

Sparkie Shock

Hey, So I'm getting the hang of DAZ and enjoying doing some renders but one thing is really bugging me.

Sometimes when you want to move a group object you select it and the universal tool XYZ thingy (Whatever it's called) appears right in the centre and allows you to manipulate. Brilliant .. BUT!! .. Other times the XYZ thing is a billion miles away from the object .. how does one go about making the XYZ thing sit in the middle of a selected object, or figure so one can more easily change things.

Trying to marry up two figures right now using very close views (Yeah you know what I'm doing :P), but in order to do fine level manipulation I'm having to zoom out just to find the XYZ thing and it's REALLY no place useful for doing fine work.

Any suggestions.

Thanks to all for earlier comments on my questions. I've become quite adept at using DAZ in only a few short days. Fairly logical when it comes to it but some things are just confusing .. like the universal tool appearing where you don't want it ... I'd like it so that it is always centred on my screen no matter what object I've got.

prixat

That position also represents the center of rotation, so you would be changing the pivot point if you did move it.

Using the sliders in the parameters tab is the only way I know round the problem.

It would be a nice feature though. Its worth making a feature request for it.

Sparkie Shock

Hmm .. certainly seems like alliterating the centre of rotation would be a good idea. Certainly I've had a lot of problems trying to add cables to a scene to find the universal tool way to far away to be helpful. But thanks for pointing out the Parameters tab .. I hadn't thought of that but yes that's made things much easier.

sriesch

A clever trick somebody else mentioned:
From the menu bar, select Create > "new null ". In the Scene pane, drag your object to the null to parent it. Now you can translate and rotate the null.

(a quick test shows this working great when the object and the null were loaded in the scene at their default positions, perhaps it will get more complicated if you have already moved stuff around.)

prixat

If you don't mind moving the origin then its alt-shift-J for the Joint Control tool (alt-shift-U to get back to the universal tool)
That will give you a tiny green axis symbol that you can drag into the new position.

Winthrod

@Scott,
I have run across the same thing! The Universal Tool (XYZ Thingy :-) ) goes to where the 'origin' of the prop/object is. If the creator of the object put the origin on the center of the object then great.

What I suspect happens is that the creator poses object for a character and parents it to that character - at which point the object may adopt the origin of the character. This is just a theory of mine and I am not sure if there is a way to center the origin back to the center of the object.

And yes, it is quite frustrating to try and pose and object to a character where the origin for the object is a distance away from the object.

Sparkie Shock

The idea of the null is a good idea, Think I'll try that. There's definitely a lot of things one needs to do procedurally before you really begin a session (Scene), but certainly learning. The other problem for me is just understanding what the hell all the techy stuff does ... or rather what it can do ... I'll have to hit the tutorial videos again. Glad I figured out how to save presets anyways .. I know seems simple but when you consider all the different things to save, it's sometimes difficult to know just which one you need.

Again my thanks to you all