Initial positioning of tree in Tutorial 5.8?

[Evan Scott]

I am feeling very noobie at the moment (maybe because I am a noobie). I did Tutorial 5.8 a month ago and thought I understood what was going on. Now I am not so sure! The tutorial blithely declares that it has provided "a simple tree" for us... and that is what is throwing me, i.e., how to get that stupid "simple tree" to sit on the ground when it is being inserted from scratch. I built my own ground plane, went through the translation and scaling by the tutorial's numbers. I even copied the "simple tree" from tutorial to cover the possibility that my "simple tree" was somehow different from the tutorial's simple tree. When I plant the tree in my foreground layer it is floating above the ground plane.

Lets assume I have tried every variation of the layer tools to get the tree to sit on the ground so that when I move around in the scene with the camera or workplace tools it appears to stay in place. And let's assume I have failed miserably or have been unable to repeat the few cases where I actually seem to have succeeded.

So what am I missing?

[slowtiger]

Take care of the point of origin of layers. It's the one point all flipping operations will turn around.

So if you draw a tree, make sure its bottom is at the origin point. Now if you flip around either the ground plane or the tree layer, they will share this point of origin as long as you don't do any translation.

[Evan Scott]

Ok, so that worked! I am pretty happy. Now I have to figure out how to keep the tree(s) from sliding around (at ground level) when I move the camera. If it ain't one thing.....

Thanks for the "Set Origin" tip tho. It really hit the spot (pun intended... sorry about that!).