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Pivot / origin

Move the pivot of any 3D model — recenter, ground-align, set custom origin

A misplaced pivot point is the silent killer of clean transforms in any 3D engine. This tool moves the origin of your model — recenter on its bounding box, align to the ground plane, or set a custom point — and bakes the result into a fresh file, no DCC needed.

change pivot 3d model · recenter mesh online · set origin glb · align to ground fbx · bake pivot point

Why use the Pivot / origin?

The pivot point of a mesh is where its local coordinate system sits. When you rotate, scale or place that mesh in your engine, every operation pivots around that point. If the origin is buried in the model's centre, the asset orbits around itself when you rotate it — fine for a barrel, terrible for a door that should swing on its hinge.

Re-baking the pivot is normally a chore: open the DCC, freeze transforms, snap origin to a face or vertex, re-export. This tool does it in one drop. Pick a preset — bottom-centre (anything that sits on the floor: characters, props, furniture), centre (turntable previews), top-centre, or any of the eight cardinals on the bounding box — or type in custom XYZ coordinates. The viewer shows the new origin live with a red/green/blue axis gizmo, so you can confirm before exporting.

The output is a new file with the pivot baked into the geometry: vertex positions are shifted so the new origin lands at (0, 0, 0). Animations and skinning are preserved. UVs, normals and materials pass through untouched. Format-in, format-out — drop a GLB, get a GLB back.

When you need this

Drop a character on the ground without offsetting the transform in your engine
Make a door rotate around its hinge by snapping pivot to the hinge edge
Centre a scanned model that exported with arbitrary origin from a photogrammetry tool
Align furniture to its base so it snaps cleanly to grid in a level editor
Re-pivot a Sketchfab download that arrived with origin floating in space
Pre-bake pivots across an asset library so every prop is "ground-aligned" by default

Tips

For anything that "sits on a surface" — characters, props, furniture, vehicles — bottom-centre is almost always the right pivot.
For turntable previews and Sketchfab-style hero shots, centre-of-bounds gives the smoothest orbit camera.
When typing a custom pivot, the axis gizmo updates live in the viewer — use it to nudge into place visually rather than guessing coordinates.
Bake your pivot once, save the result, and import that into your engine. Avoid moving the pivot at runtime — it shifts the centre of mass for physics and breaks animation root motion.

Common pitfalls

Read these before running the tool — they save hours of debugging.

Baking pivot ≠ moving the model

This tool moves the origin to a new point in the model's space, then bakes that point as (0, 0, 0). Visually, nothing moves — but the file's local coordinate frame has changed. Drop the new file in your engine and it will sit where the new origin is, not where the old one was.

Animations have their own pivot too

If the mesh is part of a skinned rig, animation curves are applied through the bone hierarchy, not the geometry origin. Baking the mesh pivot does not affect the rig — for that, you need to re-root the skeleton in your DCC.

Multi-mesh files share one origin

A scene with three meshes and one root node gets one re-pivot operation applied to the root. If each mesh needs its own pivot, split the file first or do it per-mesh in your DCC.

Bounding-box presets ignore animation poses

Bottom-centre, centre, etc. are computed on the rest-pose geometry. If your character animates in T-pose then walks, the bottom-centre at rest pose may sit slightly above the ground at frame 30. For animation-driven foot placement, use foot-IK targets in the engine.

Frequently asked questions

Which formats are supported?
Input and output: GLB, OBJ, FBX and STL. The output format matches the input by default but you can change it before exporting.
Will animations still play correctly after re-pivoting?
Yes for static geometry. Skinned animations driven by a bone rig are unaffected because the rig owns the animation transform — not the geometry origin. Vertex-animated meshes (morph targets) are also preserved.
What does "ground-align" do?
It sets the pivot to the bottom-centre of the bounding box, then shifts vertices so the new pivot lands at (0, 0, 0). The model now sits exactly on Y=0 (or Z=0 if your file uses Z-up).
My pivot looks right in the preview but offset in my engine — why?
Engines may apply their own import transforms (scale, rotation, axis flip). Check the import settings; the FBX importer in Unity, for instance, has a "Bake Axis Conversion" option that can introduce an offset.
Can I batch re-pivot a folder of assets?
Not from this page — drop one file at a time. For batch processing, the REST API accepts up to 32 files per request with the same pivot preset applied to all.

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Need to do this from your backend? See the API.