Rotating model on diagonal edge

[carlweston]

I have a really simple problem that I can't seem to get my head around.
I am trying to rotate a cube on it's diagonal but seem unable to do it.
To explain, I have created a cube and rotated it (for this exercise it doesn't matter which axis it's been rotated on or what angle).
The cube has had it transformations frozen and the history has been deleted.
What I would like to do is rotate the cube on one of the diagonal edges. The problem is that the manipulator handle isn't in line with the diagonal edge so the cube rotates incorrectly.
I have tried switching to local mode but the manipulator doesn't change.
Is it possible to rotate the manipulator handle to line up with an edge, so when you rotate the cube it rotates on that edge.
Hope this makes sense.

[rival2000]

I would suggest remaking the cube if you can, rotating it 45 degrees and now it will spin on one of its diagonals. If you can't remake it, i guess you could just make a camera and put it at a 45 degree angle and use the free transform rotation to make it rotate diagonally. It is hard to understand what you're talking about, so sorry if this doesn't' help you at all.

[iconoklast]

I believe the only way to achieve this would be to parent the cube to a locator. Where the locator is rotated along the diagonal edge that you want as the axis of rotation. You'll have to use the locator's local rotation.

[joojaa]

Not the ONLY one but a quite effective one... Anyway i can think of atleast 12 different solutions to this.

[iconoklast]

Interesting, could you provide other possible solutions that would work as effectively as a locator?

[joojaa]

locator = visible transform. So conceavably any transform will do.

As would clusters, and make a animation tool automaticaly of it. But offcourse thay are transforms. And you would need to countrermove to bind.

Snapping and turning the pivot by script works as well, espacialy good if its a pure modelling tool. There might be no need to cleanup afterwards even.

feeding a custom operator to a transformGeometry node...

Laticce turned to right orientation and with pivort fixed.

bend with same idea as laticce above.

Wrap, wire and skeleton joint... (altough joint is unfair as its atransform like is cluster by the way). Joints wouldn have the clusters problems as they have bind pose.

Using mel to calculate the turn (no foeedback unlike all other things)

Using expression.

Using a cutom context tahts driven by mel.

Using Api you can also do this in a few lines...