Hi Dan, also maybe a little demo here of what those "adjust axis orientation" steps are actually used for would help a bit.

Because you have a circular shape, it doesn't really matter how it is rotated left or right around the perpendicular. But for other shapes there may be some particular feature of the shape that you want to position.

Like here I use the "adjust orientation" steps to control orienting the tip of this asymmetrical shape.

I position the orientation widget so the base frame is set up with the x axis pointing towards the tip (this is done by dragging on the axis line and releasing the mouse over the spot you want it to point at), and then when placing the target orientation, when manipulating the target x axis it is like manipulating where that tip is pointing towards:



So that's a kind of shape where you may want to have more control over the rotations, that's why there is that second adjustment step for both the base and the target.

If the automatically determined orientation is fine for your case then you just right-click (or push the Done button or push Enter) to accept it instead of tweaking it.

Does that help to make more sense of the whole orientation process?

Also one other note - the reason why you can adjust the "base orientation" is so that you don't necessarily have to rotate the object around to point towards the world x,y,z axis directions before you do the orient. If you use one of the other methods like the "Copy with origin" method I wrote previously, that does not incorporate an adjustable base orientation, that just takes the world (or actually current CPlane) axis directions as the base one.

- Michael