Origin instead of pivot, this is the advantage of Bledner. It is not obvious to everyone.You need to understand the mathematical part.
Don’t be mad at me, please.
I respect your position, and I agree that it’s worth adding gizmos for the cursor. But I really hope that the origin will not be replaced by a pivot.
No, there are many ways, it depends on the imagination. it is not necessary to solve the problem with brute force. How long have you been using a blender?
He explained that he is forced to parent the object to an empty.
Complicating scene by adding more objects for something so simple, it is not a solution.
It is absolutely not “solving problem with brute force” to avoid to double amount of objects present in scene.
As I said I know that you can use active element, bounding box center, 3D Cursor, Individual Origins as pivot of your transformations.
The object of a papercut is not that you can code something to display a gizmo shifted from origin.
The problem is that Blender does not provide a simple solution for that to any user, by default.
It is not the users who want to move origin to move pivot point. It is the way Blender is made that does not give other reasonable alternative.
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For 13 years of using the blender, I never had a similar problem that could not be simply solved by the available methods without overloading the scene.
I repeat:
It’s worth adding direct origin correction tools. It is easy to implement programmatically. BUT, the transition from the method of origins to pivots is too important a step, requiring VERY weighty arguments.
It could be solved something like this:
Location Only is the same as the current Origins Only in master, but I changed the name here to avoid confusion with the new option to actually only transform the origin.
Objects Only in the opposite of only transforming the origin: It lets you transform objects while leaving the origin in place.
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That would be fairly easy to do as a command in a Add-on for example. Process would be something like:
- Select Object
- Click Command
- Drag Mouse in 3D View, with snap enabled, or not
- Release LMB
- Object Location is set to last position of cursor and vertices are all moved by the difference between the original Object Origin and the new one.
Shouldn’t take a good programmer too long to build…
Cheers, Clock.
There have already been addons to do this, which do it in a similarly hacky way.
IMO this is a basic, core feature and should be added to Blender proper.
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IMO, it does not make sense to repeat a “Affect Something Only” terminology.
“Origins Only” is too close to old expression to indicate something new.
I think the better way to avoid confusion is by using verbs.
I would keep “Affect Origins Only” for current behavior, use “Redefine Origins” for new option and “Shift Object Data” instead of “Objects only”.
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This kind of stuff needs to go “proper” in blender.
Still, moving gizmos in blender still sucks in general, because it disappears when you move it. This should be fixed/changed.
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but… blender can do that already so clearly it want that huge a deal.
You just replied to a nearly three year old topic. A lot can change in three years. Especially with Blender over the last 2 years alone so much has been improved.
But yes - this feature has been in Blender for a few releases already now.
Nothing has changed. Working with gizmos and pivot/origin is still pain in the butt. Many people have to use 3rd party addons to make it more or less comfortable.
I can easily get the 3d cursor more or less anywhere I want using ‘cursor to selected’. Setting the origin to the 3d cursor is easy.
I get that it’s different from other software, but for something you mostly do once at the end of modeling it’s a really minor thing imho.
Now I’ve seen some people say that they position their 3d cursor by orbiting and clicking on the model. If you do that I can understand you feel it’s a very clumsy system. So don’t do that 
Maybe someday someone will make the desired gizmos to move the 3d cursor, but until then ‘cursor to selected’ is your friend.
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When you work with a lot of complex modular models, you have to move pivot(origin) around all the time. Besides Blender I have to use additional app - Softimage XSI and there you can control pivot the same way you control 3d cursor in Blender i.e. hold a key, reposition pivot, release the key. Done. Is it possible in Blender? Absolutely. But you have to either “learn to code” and create your own addon or rely on the third-party addons like pivot transform, friendly pivot, etc…
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The complexity — and oftentimes multi-step procedure to move it to the selection — for the 3d cursor means that it is quite a chore to work with, even when using addons. For instance, there is no transform.rotate “transform 3d cursor” option to rotate the 3d cursor using hotkeys. In Grease Pencil, the 3d Cursor is definitely not something you set when you are done. With every 3d sketch, you need to set the 3d cursor to a new position. To do so efficiently, you don’t want to change from the tools tab (with the Grease Pencil brush settings and colour picker) to the view tab, where the 3d cursor resides. As something that is vital to working in Blender, the 3d Cursor is very underdeveloped. It should have:
- Transform gizmos for moving
- Rotation gizmos, as these help transform the Grease pencil canvas direction
- Hotkeys to rotate the 3d Gizmo (i.e. by 90 degrees relative to the view)
- Bookmark cursor positions with a custom name (so you can recall them at any time)
- Expanding the N-panel with input boxes for relative position and rotation (so you only have to type -500 to move it by 500 units in the negative direction or rotate by 30 degrees by typing “30”)
- Click on any of the Gizmos arrows to be prompted with an input box (so you can move/ rotate by clicking on the gizmo, input value, hit enter > done).
I meant the origin. I move the 3d cursor around all the time.
I myself really prefer the exactness of moving the 3d cursor only by ‘cursor to selected’ ,and can’t really imagine why you would want to do that visually. But to each his own of course. I admit I never manipulate the 3d cursor with the mouse because it’s just too error prone. And it’s very well possible I would do that more often if it would work better ;-).
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I would, for instance do this to move the Grease Pencil canvas in by 500mm, that could have just been a click on a Gizmo arrow and type, now I need to switch tabs for that twice as well.
I use Kekit’s Fit Cursor & Align to do this, which uses the mouse position and is context sensitive. It can reset the cursor when in a blanc area, go to the centre of an object in object mode and in edit mode it is aligned to the selection (face for face mode, edge for edge mode and vertex for vertex mode). It is really convenient.
However, when I am not doing any Mesh modelling (e.g. in Grease Pencil or Sculpt mode) then I would have to select an object > go into edit mode for the object > select an element > hit my hotkey to move the cursor. Or enable snaps > use “transform.translate” with move Cursor enabled > set snap options (optional) and click a target destination.
But neither method covers moving the Cursor by distance X or rotate the Cursor by angle Y. That’s why there should definitely be a Gizmo for the Cursor.
Not to mention the two aforementioned methods are all custom configured using addons and custom keymaps. None of this is possible in vanilla Blender, so it’s really hard and inconvenient for new users to get the hang of this.
Moving the 3D cursor with a gizmo would be hugely benneficial for my workflow. Specially when working with mirrored objects that when you set 3D Cursor to selected it doesn’t take into account the mirror modifier. If I could drag it to the middle with the gizmo it would be amazing.
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here is Gismow pie menu - #5 by bnzs - Basics & Interface - Blender Artists Community script (working in 3.2.2) which is allow move and rotate 3d cursor like regular object