Empties: More customisation, custom empties etc...
Hi ! I've been working with empties on several projects to manipulate stuff or for modifiers helper and so on.. like classic empty usages. But sometimes, you are in a situation where the empty (let's take the circle) is not oriented in a logical way according to the usage. While it's possible to turn them like anyother object, the transform it is getting can mess up the rest.
I find it would be nice that in the empty's properties, along with the empty size, we could modify the display rotation, so for exemple the circle would lay flat on the floor rather than standing upward by default. It would be also nice to:
- be able to change the line thickness,
- for arrows the tip size,
- for box, xyz size.
Another idea would be to be able to create custom empties from mesh. And why not Empty color (but i think i've seen that request already).
4 Comments
Have you tried using delta transforms for this? I typically rotate the circle to what I want it to be and then hit ctrl-a to apply all transforms to deltas. Then I can use it as normal, alt-g, alt-r, alt-s to reset, etc.
Also, you can use duplis on empties to set them to display as any arbitrary object or collection.
* @Josephbburg * Oh i never thought about the delata transforms, it's usage is quite obscure to me. I thought it was reserved for animation mostly. But thanks :)
* @darknoodlesorigine * It's the best solution for that particular problem, since empties don't have data that transformations can be applied to. It's also doable via parenting tricks - create a root empty at the origin, then create an empty at the right place, lock all its transforms. Make it a parent of the root. Finally, create ANOTHER empty parented to that one, and clear all its transforms.
If you do it that way, you can use deltas for whatever you want, but it's a lot of pain to do something an armature could do much more easily.
* @Josephbburg * hmm. thats idea