UPDATE: looks like the issue was caused by my rotating the wedge prior to scaling. Hadn’t noticed that the object’s x and y were rotated as well. Call it a momentary lapse of intelligence!
So I’m coming back to this course (and redoing these early lessons) after a while away, and ran into a surprising behavior while scaling my wedge. I made sure to follow Michael’s lead in creating and scaling it just to be sure I wasn’t missing anything obvious. What I found was that instead of scaling around a given axis (eg making it skinnier or fatter around the x), I’m scaling the extent of the object in that dimension (eg making it longer or shorter along the x). Michael’s example shows the former behavior, and I’m not sure what I did to break that. Rotate and Translate work as expected. I did check to make sure that transform is set to Global rather than Local, and the axes agree in any case… Could I have flipped a switch somewhere while fumbling with keyboard shortcuts? Thx.