How do I change an object's preferred rotation?

Question

I'm working on improving an existing Tabletop Simulator mod. It includes an object with a custom model, which will be moved around by the players. Players also need to be able to rotate the object, to indicate that it's been "disabled". When playing in cardboard, players knock the piece on its side to indicate it's disabled. Tabletop simulator also makes it easy to flip the object over, with the F key, and it balances just fine upside down, so I'd be happy either tipping it over or flipping it.

The problem is that, after using the F key to flip the object, or rotating it in any other way I can think of, as soon as a player picks the object up to move it, it reverts to its default rotation, and we can't see that it's disabled anymore - we have to remember to flip it again once we put it down.

I think the right solution here is to use states instead of just rotation. The Spirit Island mod does this, for example, with the Dahan pieces: state 2 is exactly the same as state 1, except that it prefers to be upside down instead of right side up, so when a player moves it, it stays upside down until you put it back in state 1.

But I don't know how to do this with my piece. I tried copying the object, flipping it upside down, and making the copy and the original into two states of a new object. But I just get an object with two identical states: they both want to be right side up. How can I convince an object to stay inverted?

Answer 1

I asked on the TTS Discord, and this is the understanding I came away with. The Custom object was configured as a Figurine, which meant it always righted itself. I could fix this by exporting the model into Blender, rotating it, and then re-importing that as a new Figurine that prefers the rotation I used in Blender. But I was happy enough to just mark it as a Generic object instead of a Figurine, so it no longer tries to right itself. Now I can just [F]lip it, and it stays flipped when I move it.

Answer 2

I later found a more satisfying way to do this. It turns out the object I wanted to flip was actually a compound object created by joining multiple smaller objects. So I took it apart, put the bottom piece on top and the rest on bottom upside-down, and glued it all back together in that orientation. Then I saved that as a new object. Now it's a Figurine with a preferred rotation, which is "right-side-up" in some sense, but looks a lot like an upside-down version of the original object. So I made this into a second state of the original object, and I can toggle between a figurine that rights itself (state 1) and a figurine that insists on being upside down (state 2).