Keep things on the ground

[Jkoseattle]

I am using some z-axis depth stuff in my otherwise pretty simple scene, which looks better than just scaling things to mimic depth. However, while I know how to move things around on the z-axis, and to look at them with the Orbit tool, the whole process seems pretty tricky. Mainly, I want to be able to keep things on the ground by default. I will set up a layer so that the Y position has it aligned with everything else sitting on the same ground. As soon as I try to adjust the depth, however, it either flies into air or goes underground, and I have to painstakingly reset the Y axis for that object again. Actually, in general, moving things around in 3d space is a challenge, mainly because multiple axes are being adjusted at the same time. Is there a preferred method for setting up 3d blocking where I can only move one axis at a time, or where I can instruct objects to stay on the ground, etc?

[synthsin75]

Moving the layer origin of the characters' main layer to their feet (the ground) might help. Hold shift to constrain to one axis, or split the axes by right-clicking the layer transform channel.