Feel like I’ve been trying for way too long to get this working, incredibly frustrating.
I downloaded a neat little pocket hole model and I need to rotate it to orient it correctly on my model. I want the (currently facing upwards) oblong aperture to be facing me. I absolutely cannot get this to rotate in this way, it only seems to want to rotate side to side, I cannot get it to “roll” over if that makes sense.
I’ve attached a video which explains far better than I could.
How on earth can I get this to rotate?! It seems to be impossible.
As the object is at a strange angle, pointing to what you want to lock to, then holding the shift key down, may do better. In my video I point to the flat end of the handle, hold down shift, then point to the center of the circle to lock to that. I clicked there, then off to the side, and could then rotate the object in the way I think you wanted it rotated.
That particular model is tiny, and has most faces reversed, as well as being rotated to a strange angle. You could fix those things too.
It might be that the component is already designed to orient onto the face in your model and once it is there, you would be able to use the face for inferencing for the Rotate tool to poistion it where you need it.
FWIW, Colin’s point about the reversed faces is normally correct however in this case, the faces are oriented correctly as it is the inside of the hole that is of interest.
See also this thread from some time ago on the forum.
Alternatively, using your existing model, you should be able to rotate it about an axis (probably the red axis) using one of the arrow keys to lock the rotation axis (R-arrow for the red axis, L-arrow for green, Up-arrow for blue).
This looks like it might be an old topic but I had the same problem. Couldn’t rotate objects the way I wanted to, but using the arrows to lock in the axis worked perfectly for me. Thank you!!