From the course: Rhino 7 Essential Training

Basic transformations: Rotating - Rhino Tutorial

From the course: Rhino 7 Essential Training

Basic transformations: Rotating

- [Instructor] Let's continue our work with transformations and take a spin around the rotation command. Like many of the Rhino commands, we can do this with the eyeball method. Meaning, I have no idea, but it sure looks good. Or we can type in numbers to get precise angles. Let's pan over to the scene where we're going to do some of our work. Now you may notice these blue lines. I'm using them for access lines, which can really help you get accurate rotation. For me, these are mandatory. Let's start off with a simple 2D rotate, which we can do here in Perspective. Although a lot of people prefer to do these in the top view. So I'm going to select this object here. It looks like it all lights up. So it's some sort of group or join together. Now I'm going to go over here to the main toolbar select on the left click for rotate in 2D. And I'm going to snap on one of the end points. Now we get to define the starting. So I'll just hold down the Shift key and go straight down. And now I can select the second reference points, which is it's ending angle. Notice the cursor tool tips has given me a readout. That's 89 degrees, 100 degrees, et cetera. And don't forget we can type in exact numbers or just say, that looks good there. Let's try that again in the Top view. So I'll double click on the label and we'll zoom in here on the Top view. The trick with some of the Top views is you may not be able to see the access line cause it's pointing right at us. So we'll be a little bit careful. We'll make sure our O snaps say Center. And then we can verify that it's snapping correctly by looking over into Perspective window. I'll select here. I'll go over to that same command, rotate in 2D, so that's a left click. And we're going to zoom in here and make sure we click on an end point. Now, over in Perspective it looks correct. So we can then type in a reference angle. And this time let's just type in a number, 32 degrees. For the 3D rotate, it's probably best to be in Perspective. So you can see all of the attributes here. Let's go to the same rotate command on the main toolbar. I'm going to right click objects to rotate, select that radar dish, right click again. We're only doing one. Now we have to select two points. We've got to define the axis. I'm going to go down to the bottom and click on the end point. Make sure your O snap is currently selected. That's the very first one over here. So select that one first, then the top one second. And now we get this same little icon allowing us to enter the starting angle and the ending angle. So let's just do this. Two random positions and not worry about typing in exact numbers. That is the 3D rotate. Now another useful way to use rotate is to fix things that are unknown angles. For example, this is angling up. And I want to get it back to vertical. Let's go to all four view ports. I'm going to bring this in a little bit closer by zooming in. We're going to leave the Perspective open just so we can verify our work. Now I'll start the 2D rotate. Over here, main toolbar, once again. I'm going to select the objects to rotate over here in Perspective so I can make sure I get the whole thing. Right click to accept. Now the center of rotation will be somewhere here in the center. And if I can find any arc or circle, the center snap will get me right to the middle. So sometimes you have to move around and there it is. There's the center. Now the next part is a little bit tricky. I've got to define this angle of the leg. So we just go up here and try to snap on something that's in a perfectly alignment and that looks like it's going to be working for us there. So click. And now we can move it around that access point we define. And if I hold down Shift, it will snap to perfectly vertical. The cool thing about this process is I have no clue what that angle was, but now I have confidence that it is perfectly vertical. So always look for those opportunities to snap to access lines. Even if you didn't plan them that way. I'm going to go ahead and maximize this and wrap it up by saying rotating has these two basic flavors we just saw. The 2D and the 3D. Unless your axis is at a weird angle, always try the easier 2D rotation first.

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