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Reset Anchor Point
Zero’ing the anchor point for an object is easy. The object moves to the anchor point. But that’s the opposite effect I often want. I want to be able to select an object and have its wayward anchor point reset to the center of the object without disturbing where I’ve carefully placed the object. Maybe its bad planning on my part but I too often find myself wanting to rotate an object and find out that it’s center is somewhere else in the 3D universe. How do I bring it back to the object and not have the object snap to wherever the center might be? I’ve search the manual and the https://WWW before asking here.
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4 Replies
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The anchor point and the position parameters are logically related so you can’t change one without the overall positioning of the layer being affected.
If you move the anchor point 100 pixels to the left (-100) you need to move the X position parameter the same distance (-100) to compensate.
If your anchor points are at rogue positions you need to note the values in question and add or subtract them from your position parameters when resetting to zero in order to keep everything as it was.
But why are your anchor points coming adrift in the first place?
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
I’m sure my rogue anchor positions (‘rogue’ is a good description!) are the result of my own poor planning. Usually I get into flying the camera around to objects at various places in 3D space and in the process I might be changing a group but the objects in the group leave their anchors behind. Or something of that order. In working with a 3D modeling program there’s an action to reset the anchor to the center of the object and I was hoping such a command existed in Motion. Your description of making note of the position numbers of the rogue anchor and compensating in the position numbers makes sense. Thank you for that.
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This doesn’t really reset the anchor point like you want and might be considered cheating, but if you group that object into a new group, that new group then has an anchor point in the center of the object (or objects, depending on if you go that route).
Naturally, you’d have to compensate for that group being your new ‘object,’ but in certain scenarios it can be helpful.
This is also quite useful for making big position changes to an already animated object without adding keyframes and screwing up the animation you already have.
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Jason.. smart thinking. Thank you.
I also had the idea of dragging the anchor data to the position data but realized that position data is absolute while anchor data is relevant. That won’t work.
So I looked at it another way and compared the anchor data with the position data. I’m not a mathematician so I can use some help here to explain, but I compared, say, a negative x position number and a negative x anchor number. The negative anchor sign means to go toward zero no matter of the sign of the position value. If the minus anchor x number passes zero then the answer would be a positive. After comparing X, Y (and Z if applicable), then I would zero the anchor position. I would then have my object in its original position and it’s anchor back home at 0,0,0.
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