Hi all,

Is there any way to know an objects position from the origin?

What I mean is: if you select an object, you get the objects details, style, size, but I would also like to see the objects distance from the origin. Is there some way to see this?

The reason I ask is that I need to move an object to a certain location in 3D space.

TIA, Mark.

Take the tool Line
Click your object where you want
then type 0,0,0 Enter
Click the line
you can see the measure on the up page corner
Undo ;)

PS If you click a point object with any tool you have directly the X,Y,Z from the origin on the page bottom ;)

Hi Mark, you asked:

> but I would also like to see the objects distance from the origin.

The problem is that distance is something measured from a single point to another single point.

An object is something that's made up of a lot of different points, so just saying the distance "to the object" is an ambiguous statement - you would need to specify which particular point on the object you wanted to be used for the measurement in order to make that non-ambiguous.

Some polygon mesh modelers maintain a kind of local origin for each object and then use that point for what they label the objects "position", however this is not very common for the base geometry in CAD programs because with a lot of objects that one particular point is just totally arbitrary.


> The reason I ask is that I need to move an object to a certain location in 3D space.

You can do this with the Transform > Move command.

To do it, select the object you want to move, and then run Transform > Move.

Then pick the first reference point on the object for the source point that you want to place.

Then for the second point, pick or type in the coordinates of the particular location that you want to move it to.

So for example if you have a box and you want to locate a corner of the box at one particular x,y,z point you would select the box and then run the Move command, then for the first reference point snap a point on to that corner of the box, and for the second point type in your x,y,z coordinate and push enter and that will place the box's corner at that exact x,y,z position.

More info on Move here:
http://moi3d.com/2.0/docs/moi_command_reference8.htm#move

- Michael

Hi Mark, so here's an illustration for why asking just for some generic "position" of an object is ambiguous.

Here's an object that I have drawn - what would you consider to be it's distance from the origin?




Would it be the location on the curve that is closest to the origin, like this:




Or maybe the distance from the origin to one of the endpoints like this:




Or maybe the distance from the origin to the center of the object's bounding box like this:




So note that these all have different distance values, so it's not very meaningful to ask for "THE distance", as if there is only one special value for that, because you need to specify which particular point on the object you want to measure it from.

Note that in many cases such as this one here just taking the center of the object's bounding box can be a kind of meaningless arbitrary point, so I'm not really too keen on just elevating that particular one to some special value in the UI - that would kind of make it seem like you were doing something accurate by using that value when it's really just some arbitrary thing.

If you use the Move command, that lets you pick a point on the object as the first step of the command, and having that point specified then gives it the context needed to be able to speak of distances and positions.

- Michael

Hi Pilou and Michael,

Thank you for your replies, both of which solved my question.

The reason I asked was that I needed to place a cylinder in an exact position on a clock back plate to 'drill' a hole.

re OWC: I understand the problem now Michael. I was of course only thinking of my particular problem. And also thanks for the explanation, very clear and succinct.

I also have to say I am most impressed with MoI3D, in particular, I needed to use imperial measurements and it was a delight to be able too enter 3/16" (for example) as a distance, rather than converting it to pixels, mm or units first.

regards,
Mark.

Thanks Mark, I'm glad that you like MoI!

Also one note about placing cylinders - if you need to place a cylinder on to a surface and the cylinder is not currently pointing in the same direction you need you can use the Transform > Orient command to do that which basically like a move + rotate combined together.

There's some more info on Orient here:
http://moi3d.com/2.0/docs/moi_command_reference8.htm#orient
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3424.13
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3424.14

And here's a demo of what that process looks like in action:


- Michael