Reply To: is there away to fix this??

[Austin Dunham]

Scott,

Alignment can be tricky to get, but it’s an important concept.

Imagine the default scene with just a cube in it.

Global alignment has X running from left to right of the screen if you’re in front view.

Y runs from back to front of the scene.

Z runs from bottom to top.

If you look at the default cube it has 6 faces.  In face orientation on each of those six faces the Z axis represents up and down, for that individual face.  Switch to face orientation, select the front face, then press g and z.  That face will slide the whole face “up” or “down”.  Since you selected the front face up will be on the global Y axis.

On the default cube that may not be very handy, but imagine a face that’s rotated by 22.21 degrees.  Maybe it’s a beveled edge.  Maybe it’s along a torus or sphere.  You want to place something perfectly aligned to one of those faces.  Or you want to slide the face perfectly up, down, left, or right.  That would be very difficult to do freehand by just grabbing it when you’re in global orientation.  It’s relatively easy to do in face orientation.

The other most commonly used orientation is “local” orientation.  Imagine an airplane.  It’s doing a banked turn.  Its front is the nose of the airplane, the tail is the back.  It has a left and a right hand wing, and a top and a bottom.  You could duplicate that plane to give it a wing man, but it’d be difficult to perfectly align the wing man from the global orientation.  On the “local” orientation when you slide it on the X axis, you’re sliding it left to right from the plane’s perspective.  Then you could slide it along the plane’s Y axis to place it behind the lead plane.