rotating around a parent prim

hi,
i have looked in all help, googled, soufht inworld help request and gone to the house of prims and the answer to this question still eludes me...

i make a cube...name it parent..i shft move it and a second cube is place away from the first..
i name this cube child...i clck child and with shift down i click parent last... i then go to tools and check link...when i go to rotate by picking the parent they rotate from the middle of both..in other words the group does not rotate around the center of parent but inbetween the 2..why is this and what am i doing wrong?

it seems that the tutorial for making a huge circular floor is based on this but i cannot get the basic operation of rotating around a parent's center to work at all...

thank u

Move the child twice as far away.

moving it 2x 3x or 10x away from the parent does nothing. when u pick them both for link the center stays in the middle. amd when u rotate them they rotate fro the middle between both of them..

obviously there is some trick or something u have to do as people r doing this all the time. the fact is i did get help from a scriptor that gave me this advice:

r: well any prim that you do llSetRot() to will rotate around it's main prim

but u see this was nice of them but it does me no good as it is script and when asked about where to put it they pointed me to lsl wiki which is great for scripting but i simply want to ROTATE AROUND A PARENT. could someone please im in world or something. i am a 3d professinal and in other programs all u do is set the pivot urself.

i've spent 4 days trying to get this answer from anyone and anywhere i can. if the lindens cannot answer ur questions inworld anywhere fine..but it reallywould be better to have answers to simple things like this somewhere.

i have hecked the knowledge base and all entries just assume thay when u link objects they will rotate around the parent.how does one achieve this. and if it is not being achieved ..then please someone tell me what i am doin wrong.

thanks u

i hope this will help anyone NOT go through what i did over the last days...

i really wish someone who KNOWS this would have just told me so i will do this for people now..

no mater how u link objects THE CENTER WILL ALWAYS BE IN THE MIDDLE OF THOSE OBJECTS...if u try and rotate manually they will always rotate around that center.

YOU MUST PICK ONLY THE PARENT OBJECT(this is the last prim u picked before linking everything)***AND ENTER ROTATION IN THE ROTATION SLIDERS******* u will always see the center lof all objects but if u pick the object u want to rotate around and use the slidersTHEN AND ONLY THEN WILL EVRYTHING ROTATE AROUND THIS PARENT OBJECT

in my opinion this is s very silly way to deal with data....anyone in 3d knows that u should always see the center of all ur objects and if need be of the parent...someone please fix this now that things r open source.

What you're seeing actually isn't a bad thing. It's a way of making up for one of SL's shortcomings. As you know, we don't have freedom to move an object's pivot point. It's always in the center, as you pointed out. So, what the interface does is it allows you to rotate the object around your choice of two pivots.

When you use the manipulator tool (drag the handles), you rotate the object around its grouped center. When you use the numbers in the editor, you rotate the object around the parent's center. It's pretty simple.

Is it clunky and hacky? Absolutely, it is. But it works, it's reliable, and it's predictable.

Now that the client has been open sourced, we'll undoubtedly see better, more standardized building tools popping up. Linden Lab's strong suit is as a server side developer. As we've all learned first hand, they're not great at client side stuff, and they know that. Hopefully soon someone will repackage the client into a modular, customizable format, and hopefully not long after that someone will create modeling modules that are far more powerful than what presently exists.

Until then, all that those of us who are not programmers can do is learn the behavior of the system we have, and operate within its framework as expertly as we can.

i agrre with many if not all of ur points chosen few
the fact is i am in a group trying to bring better tools for modeling and animation into sland i wanted to give the tools a spin as i really was not feeling them before until i saw some of the new electric sheep stuff and the things people were doing with flex prims such as hair and costumes and so on.

i suppose what was most iritating was that it was so darn hard to figure his out ..how the system does deal with data. a very simple thing like this should be pointed out. instead most tutorials, self help, inworld help request and even the tutorials in the tower of prim do not point out this way of doing things so it is clear to those that r learning. his really got my goat. i will admit finally a linden in help request said "just use the numbers" but then i really did have to figure out what that meant..was i script???? ..should i measure...???..and the transform and rotate wirth the numbers...

u don't teach a music student by telling him..play the blues!!..until he knows the rule of 1. chords and scales. 2. the structure of that form and 3. how the basics work...

i really felt like i was pulling teeth to get this answer.

if it works different. fine. but just make that crysal clear to people so they can get on with it

when all is said and done..i am happy i found the solution..on to building the deathstar

You're right, Gerd. The documentation on the building tools is pretty lacking. What little there is is pretty much all user-written. Unfortunately it can be a little hard to anticipate what people won't know or won't be able to figure out. Your question was a good one, and tghe answer was far from obvious, so it's not surprising that you had trouble finding the answer.

I try to monitor this forum and the texturing forum several times each day to scan for questions just like yours, and see that they get answered quickly. There are a few others who volunteer time to do the same thing. I'm sorry none of us got to this thread sooner. (I've been at a Sheep meeting since Sunday, so my time has been pretty limited.)

Anyway, I'd love to hear more about whatever tools you guys are working on. Have you seen my Open Source Wish List post on the feature suggestions forum? If you could tackle some of that stuff, you'd be my hero.

no i have not seen this post. i would like to see it though... can u provide a link? i looked and can't find it.

i have a meeting tomorrow with some of the dev people and would love to bring up some of these things.

cheers

The largest prim I gather is 10x10x10. How would I make a large sphere? Large enough to make into a mall with many floors? I saw a large submarine that someone made in a sandbox and it was much larger than 10m wide.

Any ideas?

With lots of maths and sections of tapered boxes, or using the "shapegen" tool to do that for you. Or using one of those hacked up giant prims.