A while ago I wrote about how to change the pivot point of an object in Unreal Engine — the short version being: move the pivot with ALT + Middle Mouse, then right-click and choose Set as Pivot Offset to make it stick. That still works exactly the same today, but I recently ran into a snag with the right-click part of that recipe, and in solving it I picked up a few tricks that deserve a write-up of their own.
The Problem: right-clicking selects the wrong object
Here’s the scenario: I had moved the pivot of a decal down to the bottom of a statue projection (so I could scale it up from the feet rather than the centre). But the moment I right-clicked on the new pivot position, Unreal selected the object behind it instead — and my carefully placed temporary pivot evaporated with the selection change. This happens all the time in busy scenes: the spot you want to right-click has other geometry in front of or behind it, and Unreal picks whatever is under the cursor.
It turns out there are several ways around this.
Trick 1: right-click anywhere on the selected object
The right-click does not have to land on the pivot point itself. The Pivot options in the context menu apply to the currently selected actor, using wherever the temporary pivot currently sits. So after your ALT + Middle Mouse adjustment, right-click on any clear part of the selected object and the menu will happily offer Set as Pivot Offset.
Even better: you can right-click the little icon that represents the actor in the viewport — the sprite you see for decals, lights, and other non-mesh actors. That icon counts as part of the object, and it’s usually floating somewhere clickable even when the geometry itself is buried. This works for all actor types, and I only discovered it by accident.
Trick 2: temporarily hide what’s in the way
If there’s genuinely no clear spot to click, select the offending objects and press H to hide them. Do your pivot business, then press CTRL + H to unhide everything. This is editor-only visibility: it doesn’t touch the actors’ actual visibility settings and has no effect on renders, so it’s completely safe.
Trick 3: parent the object to an empty actor
For my scale-from-the-feet use case, there’s an approach that’s arguably better than pivot surgery altogether: drop an Empty Actor into the level, position it exactly where you want the pivot to be, then drag your object onto it in the Outliner to attach it. Now you scale or rotate the parent, and the child follows — growing up from the feet, in my case, exactly like parenting to a null in After Effects.
Two things worth knowing here:
- When you attach, the child keeps its current world position — it doesn’t snap to the parent’s origin. So position the empty first, then attach, and nothing visibly moves.
- Dragging in the Outliner and right-clicking an actor and choosing Attach To… do exactly the same thing under the hood. The latter just gives you a searchable picker, which is handy in a large scene.
[Screenshot: Outliner showing the empty actor as parent with the decal as child]
Bonus: this is not the same as Sequencer’s Attach track
One distinction worth making: the attachment we’ve just created lives in the level and persists until you explicitly detach. Sequencer’s Attach track is a different beast — it’s a temporary, keyframeable attachment that only applies for a range of frames and releases when the section ends. Perfect for a prop being picked up mid-shot, but not what you want for a permanent pivot helper. The two can coexist: a level attachment stays in effect underneath, and a Sequencer attach track can temporarily override it on top.
And if all you need is the classic pivot workflow, the original article still has you covered.