When doing transformation Blender use a reference point called the pivot point. But to really understand how to use the pivot point for us, we need to discuss about the origin. So what is exactly origin? To make things simple, basically origin is the center of an object Blender use the origin as the reference point for calculating coordinates. If you select an object, you will see an orange.in the center of it, this is the origin. If we select another object, you will see the origin here also indicated by an orange dot.

Now if we activate the move tool, for example, the manipulator position will be located at the origin by default. Notice if we select this cube, then go to the edit mode, and then select all of the vertices and then move them like so. We actually just move the vertices away from the Objects origin, we can see that this orange dot now located outside of the geometric volume. If we press tab to go back to the object mode, we can see the move manipulator is located outside of the cube. Now, of course, most often we don't want to have something like this, I'm just trying to explain that the origin is actually not part of any mesh elements. origin is basically just a point of reference in 3d space.

We are going to discuss about the origin more in depth later in the future section of this course series. For now, we just need to know that each object has a center point called origin. Okay, now let's move on to discussing about the pivot point. As I mentioned earlier, pivot point is a reference point used when doing transformation. Let's see how this pivot point works in render, to access the pivot point options, we can click on this pulldown list in here. Or you can also use the dot key below the Electra key to access the pivot point by menu.

Remember, not the dot key in the numpad, but the dot key at the left below the L letter key. Okay. Now if we only have one object selected, most of these pivot point options will be ignored, except this option to the cursor. So if we select active element, median point, indefeasible, origin and bounding box center, none of them really matter and Blender will use the origin of the object as the pivot point instead, if we hold shift and then right click on the spot to reposition the 3d cursor, then to 3d cursor as the pivot point mode from the pulldown list, notice the position of the manipulator is now located at the 3d cursor, not at the objects origin anymore. If we rotate the rotation, we will use the 3d cursor The center of the rotation. If we scale the object, the scaling, we also use the 3d cursor as the scaling center.

So again, if we only have one object selected, the only option matters in the pivot point list is this 3d cursor option. Okay, now if we have multiple objects selected, this is where we start to see the benefit of pivot point. Let's discuss the pivot point options one by one. The first option is called the active element. We have talked about the concept of active object in Blender before, if we have multiple objects selected, the active object will have the brightest color of all almost like yellow color. If we have the active element set as the pivot point, then this object which is the active object, its origin will be used as the center of the transformation.

So if we rotate all of them by going to the Rotate Tool and drag this blue circle for example, as we can see, the rotation will happen circling around this active object. If we hold shift and then click on this one, this object now is the active object indicated by its bright yellowish color. If we rotate again like so the whole selection now rotating around this object instead. Next, let's discuss the individual origins option. This option when activated, we will create multiple pivot points on each of the objects origin to show you the difference. For example, if we select the bounding box center as the pivot point and do a rotation, we will get something like this.

Now, if we select individual origins as the pivot point, when we rotate, we will get this result. Each object rotates independently. If we use the Scale tool and do scaling each other objects will scale using their own origin as the center point, okay. The last two types of pivot point are the bounding box Center and the median point. Both of them are almost identical. What makes them different is that bounding box will create an imaginary box surrounding the object, then use that imaginary bounding box to calculate the center location and use that as the pivot point.

Median point on the other hand, we will calculate the center location of every object in a selection and then average them to find the center location. Median point is the default option for pivot point mode. In object level mode, both bounding box center and median point are almost identical, but in edit mode, they are very different. in edit mode, the median point option will use the density of the geometry to determine the location of the pivot point while the bounding box center option will not. So for example in here, I already have a cube. If we go inside the edit mode, we can see that the right side has denser vertices than the left side.

Now if we select all of the vertices and choose a bounding box center for the pivot point, notice the location of the manipulator is always at the center of the cube, regardless of the furthest East concentration, but if we select the median point, we can see the pivot point is now shifted to the right a bit. Again, this is because the density of the mesh is now taking into account