I have a .blend file with many objects, and when I load it up in jme (3beta) using…assetManager.loadModel(…) (currently loading .blend files directly).
All the objects load up properly in the correct position, etc.
but…I noticed that when I rotate and object, its rotating around the ‘world’ origin, I would have expected each object to ‘preserve’ its local origin vs the world. (i.e. when calling the objects getlocalTranslation, and getWorldTranslation, they both return 0,0,0.
is there no way to preserve an objects local origin from the blender file?
I can of course create a dummy node, and move it…etc…but…kind of pain to find the actual position in jme, vs blender.
thanx for any tips/guidance 
The models (so the objects in blender) are probably all in the center of the scene and only your meshes (the vertices) are in another location. This is the same relation as geometry-mesh for jme3. Since you rotate the geometry (objects in blender) you always rotate around the world center. You have to edit your objects in blender so that they have their center at the mesh center.
Yeah…I did thats the weird thing…I moved the origin on the object in blender to the appropriate point, but still when I do a rotate…it rotates around the world center, not the geomitries.
In blender I do: object: tranform:origin to X…
I guess I can try and use a dedicated pivot point, since I know that works.