Object and Animation Basics - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 40

If you have not worked with one before, the transformation manipulator is an on-screen tool for transform-
ing objects with the mouse. When enabled with the translate controls, as seen in Figure 3.12 , a three-colored
figure appears, centered on the selected object. By LMB dragging on any of the arrowheads, the object is
translated along that axis. Note that the colors of the axes on the widget correspond to the general axis colors
used in Blender ( x = red, y = green, z = blue). In Figure 3.12 , translate is on the left, rotate is in the center,
and scale is on the right. Keeping with the standards of selection in Blender, you can actually Shift select the
widget buttons on the header to enable more than one transformation mode at a time.
While it is usually more efficient to just use the keyboard commands (G/S/R) for transforming, there are
some times when the manipulator can make your life easier. To see how, take a look at the last control
on the right in Figure 3.12 . Until now, we have been doing these transformations in Global mode. In
Global mode, x is always left to right, y is front to back, etc. Pretend for a second that you've rotated an
object in several ways. If we were to make the object's axes “sticky,” rotating along with it, the global x
would then be different than the object's “sticky” x . Figure 3.13 shows such a setup. Notice how the axis
situated on the monkey has a different orientation than the main global axis beside it. This “sticky” axis
is called Local space, an axis system defined locally by an object.
Figure 3.13 An object's axis showing local space.