Custom origin for collection instances.
Currently a collection gets its origin from the center of world coordinates. (I dont know if static overrides let us set custom origin.) When i use an instance of it, I need to add another empty as parent to use as origin but it doesnt look like a good solution.
3 Comments
In pre-2.8 Blender, groups could have an arbitrarily set origin. With any luck, this feature will return in 2.80
That'd be really useful, collections are great to make pieces of a model and instance them around the scene, but having to place them all overlapped in the origin is a pain to work with. I had no idea a custom origin was possible pre-2.8 ... So i checked if something was available via Python ... and it seems so !: bpy.data.collections['collection-name'].instance_offset=(x,y,z) does just that. Seems the feature exists, but afaik there's just no UI for it (yet, hope it's coming and not hidden for other reasons... ). Hope this helps , it's rel. easy to set it from Python console for now, or to make a simple script to have an UI
Edit : oh wait .. there is 'a bit' of UI : if you set an outliner window to 'data_api' you can browse to the collection you need and see all the properties, including the offset, and you can give it x,y,z coords you want to use as pivot .. not sure if there's a better way to do it already but surely a script could make it quicker (i.e. use current cursor position to define offset of active collection..) Edit 2 : Or even better : the there is actually a box for coordinates of that origin right in the 'object properties' tab ! for any object, where it lists the collections it belongs to, you can specify the instancing offset of each colletion.. Not sure if that box is a recent addition or was always there :D
Its still not in there yet. I am finding it really frustrating that group instances use the world origin. It means I have to build all my components in the one place and toggle the sub groups visibility if I want to work on them. It would be nice if I could "lay them out on the table" without having to worry about where their instance origin is going to end up in the main scene.