Monday, April 9, 2012

Re-align origin for rotate command

A great feature when I have used a lot in the past.  When you select an object that you want to rotate and click on the rotate button in the Modify ribbon, you get a line that rotates around the center point.  Depending on the object or the family, that origin point that shows up by default could  be anywhere.  Sometimes it is near the object sometimes it is not.  Sometimes you have to search for it to find it.


 Previously you could hover over the origin and drag it to whatever location you wanted and it would snap to families, objects or lines that already existed (usually at endpoints).  I have done this a lot of I want to rotate an object about a certain point.  (you can also use the <spacebar> to rotate something 90 degrees which is also a great time saver)

 A new feature in 2012 I have noticed is a button that appears on the options bar when the rotate command is active.  Click on this button and it places the origin of the rotate command on your cursor.  Awesome!