Insert Plane - aligning to selected plane

FirePro9

Just learning Carrara and can't quite figure out why when I do an Insert Plane that it does not align to the front plane either when I am in the front view nor when I select the plane in the Plane Icon tool. The plane always ends up parralel to the floor plane.

Perhaps I need to add a keyboard press but none I tried worked.  I didn't find a preference for it either.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.  Thanks.

Dartanbeck

I could be incorrect in this, but I believe that all items insert in one specific orientation, whereas location can be determined by where we click in the scene. I never do that, but always opt to Insert directly from the menu, which places items at their zero position, unless they've been saved elsewhere.

So to orient the item correctly, we have a few time-savers. If we're just looking for a simple 45 or 90 (or 135, 270, 180, etc.,) degree rotation, we can hold the Shift key as we rotate the item using the rotation tool. We may also go into preferences and change the number of degrees the Shift/Rotate snaps to - default being 45 per snap.

Aligning will center one itme to the center of another item. This is done using Edit > Align (Ctrl + K)

Note that during the align, we may select which axis get aligned, so we may actually align to one, two, or all three axis.

To do this, select the item that we need to 'align to' first, then Shift Select the item we need to align to the first selection, then use Ctrl + K (or Edit > Align)

Hope this helps some ;)

FirePro9

Thank you Dartanbeck, that does the job.

I was following along a Make Your Own Particles tutorial by Cripeman and it appears at this point in the video (2:10) that he simply inserts the plane parallel to the Front plane without doing any obvious rotation.

I suppose he could be performing some kind of keyboard shortcut.  

Glad to know my Carrara software is running correctly.  Thanks for the help! 

DesertDude

FirePro9 - I just did a quick test in Carrara 8.5 and 8.1. Using 8.1 (and I'm guessing earlier versions - I don't have them installed anymore on my computer to test) you can insert a plane and have it "face" Front, Left, Right, Back depending on the viewport settings. You need to select the tool (plane) and then click in whichever viewport you want. If you drag and drop using the plane tool, the plane seems to always be parallel to the floor. But in 8.5, no matter the method of inserting a plane, it seems to always be parallel to the floor.

So, maybe something broke from 8.1 to 8.5? Just a guess.  :(

FirePro9

DesertDude, thank you for checking....it was kinda bugging me that I couldn't do something that looked so easy.  Now I know it was not me!