Realigning the Axis to Geometry Okay so like many other people I have asked this question into google and gotten back some VERY complicated answers on how to do this. All I want to do is have the XYZ axis move itself into position relative to the object and it's orientation when in local mode.

Easy right?

Seems not. Every answer relies on hooking, creating an empty .. or doing a bunch of other things I can't remember and every time I have this problem its crippling.

Even in Second Life .. YES SECOND LIFE .. you can just pop into local mode and your axis behaves itself properly. Why the hell is this so damn hard to do in blender.

Perhaps I'm missing something, perhaps I've asked the question wrong (in the 96 different ways I've tried to ask it). Youtube videos on this subject often don't solve the problem and the few that do usually are non verbal and don't explain what the hell they did to reorientate.

So my question is more ... why can't blender have this functionality where in Local mode the axis just orienatates to the geomtry you're editing or moving?

And I'd be eternal grateful if someone can give a simple, comprehensive explanation how to get my axis to align to my geometry and stop me from going insane?!?

As you can see from the pic below .. my axis is fine on the Z .. but X and Y are not being helpful at all. All I wanna know is how do I get this to work properly. Local mode REALLY should automatically reset the axis to follow the object .. don't you think?



I appreciate any and all answers .. espeically those that sort out this problem. And if any Dev's for blender are reading ... seriously if Second Life can do this .. why not blender?
Create a new transform-orientation based on sub-object (component) geometry, like edges. The Z-axis will point in the direction of the cross-product of any two edges selected.

If you are not familiar with that term, the cross product is the vector that is normal to 2 other vectors. Keep the following in mind as examples:

The Z-axis is the cross-product of the X and Y-axes;

The X-axis is the cross-product of the Y and Z-axes;

the Y-axis is the cross-product of the X and Z-axes;

(You can also look up "cross-product" or "Right Hand Rule" for a way to visualize general cross-product vectors. It is not necessary to know the math to visualize a cross-product)

The cross-product of 2 vectors is perpendicular (in 3d we say "orthogonal" or "normal") to the plane the 2 vectors are in:



Say I wanted to create this fan shape so that it was oriented to the curvature of the bookshelf. The shape is a quarter-circle in the plane that I could have made a few ways, but I did it by rotating duplicates of edge components about this corner (the cursor is placed there and transformations are oriented about the cursor). To do that, I first had to get my transform orientation right. I did that by selecting the 2 orthogonal corner edges shown here, then creating a new transform orientation from that, as shown below:



This is the result:



Notice that the transform orientation is still usable even after returning to object-mode:



Now I was able to rotate edge duplicates about the corner, in a plane that is normal to the bookcase. Rotations are done about the new Z-axis in this orientation.  Big-picture: