How can I move the model around in the scene?

[adamkewley]

AK: question asked as part of an email chain, details omitted, but it's a useful question to document here

Silly question, but how can I move my model around in the 3D scene? Specifically, I would like to move my model away from the floor.

[adamkewley]

The location of your model in the 3D scene is mostly dictated by the model's joint topology and frames. Therefore, if you want to be able to move your model freely around the 3D scene then you will probably need either a "root" FreeJoint that acts as a model manipulation joint (this is quite common in the demo models) or you will need a "root" PhysicalOffsetFrame that's connected to Ground, which will act as a manipulate-able base frame for the entire model.

if you already have a FreeJoint that's connecting your model to ground then you can move the model up/down by changing that FreeJoint's vertical translation coordinate in the coordinate editor. Many of the demo models have such a FreeJoint. You can lock the joint's coordinates to prevent the model from free-falling at simulation time.

If you don't have a FreeJoint connecting your model to ground, then you could add a PhysicalOffsetFrame by doing the following:

• Figure out which of your joints are connected to ground (you may have multiple joints connected to ground)
• Then right-click ground in the Navigator panel and add an offset frame. This creates a freely-movable frame that's connected to ground that can be edited in the visual editor, or via the properties editor. You can perhaps rename this frame to "model_offset" or similar
• Then, for each of your joints that are connected to ground; instead, connect them to the newly-created offset frame
  • Right click the joint
  • Go to the Sockets menu
  • Change the parent_frame socket
  • Select the offset frame to be the new parent frame of the joint, rather than ground
• Once this is done for all applicable joints, you should then be able to move the whole model by moving the offset frame