Rotate does not update dimensions

Question

I'm new to Blender and I'm following some tutorial and reading the documentation. Here is described how to rotate or scale an object.

I imported an stl file that is shown rotated of 45 degrees on z-axis. When I select, its dimensions are:

• X 201 m
• Y 201 m
• Z 15 m

This is because it's rotated of 45° as said (it's a magic wand, like a rod). So I rotated it by 45° using the transform panel (or R key). Well, now it's aligned to the Y axis!

But the dimensions are still the same! I'm expecting something like:

• X 15 m
• Y 283 m
• Z 15 m

I'm in trouble now because I cannot scale it as desired. Surely I'm missing something obvious... but I cannot find it out from the documentation.

Answer 1

If you want to check final size after a rotation, you need to apply the rotation: CONTROL+A > APPLY ROTATION

before rotation applied:

after rotation applied:

more info:

Applying transform values essentially resets the values of object’s position, rotation, or scale, but does not actually do anything to the object. The object origin point is moved to the global origin and the transform values are set to zero. In terms of scale, the scale values return to 1.

To apply a transform select the Apply sub-menu from the Object menu or use the shortcut Ctrl-A and select the appropriate transform to apply. The Operator panel lets you choose the combination of transformations to apply.