Mesh Align Plus

Coding Released Scripts and Themes
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ADDON SUMMARY (Edited to include extra info/details)

Mesh Align Plus helps you move things around, precisely: arrange objects in your scene, align mesh parts to each other while you’re modeling, and create complex custom transformations using measurements from your models.

In other words, Mesh Align Plus is designed to provide precision modeling capabilities, especially for hard surface modelers, mechanical, architectural and CAD/CAM users.

Some real world examples of things you can do with the addon:

  • Align objects by their faces
  • Measure and match angles, distances, and lengths for parts of your models
  • Rotate an object around an edge
  • Move in the direction of an edge, face normal or set of verts
  • Directly set the dimension/length/scale of arbitrary sub-features of your model
  • Much more…

Most things take just a few seconds to perform, but the addon also allows you to do really sophisticated and abstract operations if you want to (with some extra setup).

Grab it here:
https://github.com/egtwobits/mesh-align-plus/releases

Wiki (with tons of GIF’s):

See these simple demo clips for a quick flavor of what’s possible:

home8

apl_v7

JOa7Fcd

I HAVE IDEAS!

Post em up! This thread will be devoted to in-depth discussion of the addon, including workflow improvements, possible new features, design issues, etc. Some people in the News thread thought that a new post in this subforum would be a good idea, so here we are! I’ll try to keep the News thread focused only on big anouncements from now on, with more detailed discussion to happen here.

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Very impressive! I will try it!Thank you!

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Wow, very good job ! Thanks, it’s very useful !

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It’s possible to implement a ‘place the selected object(s) on the center of selected face(s)’ after the ‘three-vertices’ selection?

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Yes, I can add something like this. Though, there are some questions about how it would work since you can use non-face geometry to define a plane (implied planes made out of 3 disconnected verts, for instance (and other non-real geometry), which has some important applications).

The most consistent/robust way for the addon to handle this would be to add shortcuts to the “Align Points” operator so that you can automatically grab the source point and destination point directly from the center of a selected face (you’d have to be in face-select mode for this to work).

There are potentially some quicker ways to do it as well (with less steps), but only for certain special cases. If people are really interested, we can talk about which cases are most important, and potentially add some special logic (or new features) in for these cases. Thoughts?

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something similar to this maybe? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7ZmqPnfIMU

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^ This is one of the special cases that came to mind for me. As long as people don’t mind the rotation not necessarily being correct after they’re aligned to each other (as in that video), I can do it.

I would probably be adding a “custom pivot point” value to all Plane items to achieve this (which would be auto-grabbed for you if you’re in face-select mode, or you can manually set it in vert mode).

Keep in mind it’s only going to work as expected if you use it right (so, don’t have 7 faces selected when you grab, don’t use non-planar faces etc.).

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aww I can not undo when use your addon orientation to my back position. you forgot to add undo implementation :smiley:

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Awesome - esp. for those of us who model buildings(!)

Next Build: When you ‘Scale Match Edge’ - you might consider adding in a numeric input box (?) and you would be able to scale (accurately) elements within an n-gon (e.g. sizing windows in a facade). It was in Modo years ago; and has been much missed having transferred to Blender.

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A few others have asked for this as well. I’ll put this in the next release :> By the way, if there are other measurements/calculations anyone wants to perform (like the recently added intersection point between a line/plane), please share.

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The good joob. Thanks for sharing

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New features, need testing/comments:

*Grab Normal (gets normal of selected face, can be used anywhere a Line/edge is needed):

http://i.imgur.com/eVRZty1.gif

fiendish55, this should serve as the ‘align and center faces’ feature you requested (shortcuts were added to quick align planes, axis rotate and directional slide for now). As noted earlier, the rotation still isn’t specified here (so you will notice for non-radially-symmetrical objects that the rotation hasn’t been set after alignment). If someone has any ideas for a good workflow for fixing this problem, I’m open to it…

*Grab Average Vert Position (for grabbing the center of a ring, or an edge, or any radially symmetrical geometry…helpful for grabbing implied axes for instance):

http://i.imgur.com/Qj2qroD.gif
Qj2qroD.gif721×544

With these new features, the geometry editing UI has become quite crammed (it was already really), so expect some changes there (rearrangement of some of the buttons). Also, these have only been added to the quicktools for the moment (will be added to adv. tools later).

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I dont have those yellow arrow icons on my 0.3 version so I can’t test it how it works :frowning:

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me too, there is missing something

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I forgot to post a link to the testing version! Here you go:

Right click and save as, or copy and paste the page contents into the blender text editor and hit ‘run script’ in the header (best to disable older versions of the addon before doing so…).
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/egtwobits/mesh-align-plus/testing/mesh_mesh_align_plus.py

Whenever I post about new features for testing, you’ll find them at that link (it points to the latest addon file on the testing branch).

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Machiya, you can do numeric inputs for “Scale Match Edge” now. This has been do-able with the Advanced Tools for a long time, but it’s in the Quick Tools now so it’s much easier/better. GIF below (really it’s just picking the same edge as source/dest and then scaling the destinatino edge via a geometry modifier):

http://i.imgur.com/k06q4NP.gif

As some of you may have noticed, I added geometry editing to the Quick Tools in an earlier update (seen in a few of the earlier GIFs). It lets you do some weird/advanced things like this (choosing a different endpoint for a line for instance), so you don’t have to use the Advanced Tools for this kind of stuff anymore:

http://i.imgur.com/NgRF3b3.gif

For numeric inputs in “Scale Match Edge”, I can make the above workflow faster (1st GIF) by adding interface shortcuts. It would involve a checkbox or something that will tell the addon to use the same edge for source/dest, and then putting the “multiplier” box (usually underneath the collapsible triangle) near the top for you when that is enabled. Or something else. Does anyone want that? Please mention so if you do.

You can do a lot with the geometry editing, hope someone can find a weird example to share…
Same link as above (Save as or paste page contents into blender text editor and hit run script…disable any previous versions first also!)

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Quick calculations are a thing now! Basically, there are 2 slots to store things in (points, lines or planes), and based on what you load into the slots, you can find things like the angle between 2 different lines, or plane/line intersection point, or distance between points, length of a line, etc.

See below, Angle between lines (Rotational Difference), same testing/download link as above:

http://i.imgur.com/dtXq2aX.gif

Right now, the item type in each slot determines what operators are enabled/disabled (if you have two planes stored then “Distance Between Points” will be disabled, for instance). You can disable this option though (in the above case it would operate on the last points that were grabbed for each slot)…

Also, some measurements only work on the first slot (like line length).

I also added an improved “Numeric Input Mode” that allows you to directly type a desired edge length in, see below:

http://i.imgur.com/FjSw9gL.gif

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I mentioned this in the News thread, but just for the sake of continuity:

New release, v0.4.0!

Download v0.4.0 here:

The new (GIF loaded) wiki:

Youtube Video:

Huge upgrades were made to advanced editing and measurement features. These improvements mean faster, more flexible and more lightweight workflows for complex operations. The Wiki has also been completely rewritten for this release (now on Github).

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Big thanks your hard works! Cheer!

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Doesn’t seem to be working in Blender 2.79. The addon wont install and show in User Prefs>Addons.

I’ve tried using the latest 0.4 version of Mesh Align Plus.