What is the easiest way to reset the rotation pivot to its default local space on an object in Maya?
In other words I want to be able to freeze transforms and keep the pivot in local space. When you freeze transforms the pivot goes into world.
The easiest way is to use a transform parent, instead of freezing. Once you freeze it, there is no “default local space” that is stored anywhere to get back to. As far as I know that information is lost.
(I haven’t tried any of the new Offset Parent Matrix stuff from Maya 2020 yet. It might also let you do stuff like this instead of adding a parent. Not sure.)
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Hey @Ross_Daniel
I agree with @chrislesage technique, that would be my “go-to” workflow as well. There is no easy way about going by this, unless you do some serious tooling to help with it. Depending on your situation and how accurate you would like that pivot to be, you could also play around with the custom pivot settings of the object.
If you double click on your move tool (1), or go to the move tool settings. You have a number of options that you can play around with.
if I wanted to get the orientation back of the Cylinder, I can click on edit pivot (2), and then the arrow above it (3), set to face mode.
It will put you into the face selection mode, then as an example I would select one of the top faces
You will see the pivot has tried to match the orientation as best as possible.
This is not exactly the same as what it might have been originally, but it might be somewhat helpful?
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