ok, I am attempting to animate a bot arm I boxed out, and,,, the arm is several objects... and, I would like to move the center little dot there over to where I wish things to pivot... the other day I was simply grabbing the dot and movung it, today it seems the whole object part wants to move... ugggg Does anybody have any insight into this? thnx

Carrara 1.x to 2.1 You may have the "center" and hotspot of the object locked. Try hitting Caps lock and attempt to move the dot. Carrara 3.x In the properties tray, select the object and in the tray, under the motion tab, there's a checkbox to lock the center and hotspot. Uncheck it and move the dot(hotspot) and then re-check the lock checkbox. There's some buttons in the properties tray that are a titch confusing. Basically one will move the object's center to the Hotspot and the other will move the hotspot to the object's center. Be careful not to hit those buttons. I did and had to redo about a hours' worth of work (it was an animation). Because of that, I often write down the coords of the various objects I have in a scene, center, hotspot, etc. hth

hi Mr.Mongo... haha, I have tried everything... had it working, then opened later and the durn things would not manip... oh well, yea, I have found to type them in... what a guessing game hehe :) but... we are bound and determined to continue on with this Wings3D/Carrara Studio 2 project... here's a wip of what we are doing... and each part including the hydr rams etc have to be able to move... thus the objects must have the hotspot in the right places... haha, what a chore thus far, and I am only at step 1/2...haha

haha, hooboyo, here I thought that this was just not right, not being able to move around those hotspots eh... and all the time it was me who was not right... I had been opening my obj files as facet meshes, instead of vertex, which is what is required to gain said contro; for dragging those hotspots around... only took bout three days worth of turning this and that off and on, only to have the solution first dialogue box from open... hahaha... well... now I will be rock'n on with this bot eh... between you and me, I dreaded the thought of having to use another app for animation... Carrara Studio 2 might not be the world's best modeling solution ;) but... for it's really good for texturing, delivers superb renders, and is very friendly when it comes to animation... all the tools one could ask for when it comes to these types of tasks...

Good news that you found a solution! BTW, as good as C2 is for texturing and such, C3 is even better. It has a gradient color and fractal noise shaders now, among others. Within the vertext modeler you can assign what's called "shader domains" and then use the layers list to give each domain its own distinct shader. The layers list is much more useable with C3 than with C2. And the vertext modeler has a lot of improvements. Modeling is so much better now in C3. The best thing I can say is that upgrading to C3 was the best upgrade I did in the past year and a half. Looking forward to your development of this project, in any case.

thnx for the reply Mr. Mongo... will keep yas posted :) and I will have a closer look into v3 :)