Align and welding tools.

Support Modeling
1

Hello,

I’m a user of 3DS Max and I’m trying my hand at blender because I enjoy the UI. In general, while strange, I like blender better for most things except I’m missing two functions that REALLY saved me time in Max.

Specifically, is there a way to do a global weld? What I mean by this is when one selects a group of vertexes, and welds together the vertexes that are within a certain distance from each other (usually very small). I use this to attach two halves of a mirrored object together when I am finished.

If this function does not exist is there another way of doing something similar? There has to be a better way of connecting two halves of a model then individually merging every single vertex.

Likewise, I’m looking for a means to align a number of selected vertexes along an axis. It’s a single button in Max, but I can’t find it anywhere in Blender.

Thanks in Advance,

  • Jack
2

Hi,

  1. Remove doubles (Rem Doubles in the Mesh pane of F9). You can adjust the limit too - the distance below which 2 vertices will be welded. To do what you describe is better done using the mirror modifier however.

  2. This might not be what you mean, but you can select the vertices and scale them by a factor of zero along a specific axis (press S, X, 0, ENTER to get them to line up perpendicular to the x-axis).

3

That is precisely what I was looking for.

Thanks a lot.

:slight_smile:

4

alt+m the ‘merge tool’ brings up 3 options:
at center
at cursor
collapse
also does the trick

5

if you used the mirror modifier, ensuring the centre of the real side is on a middle vert, it will connect the two halves when aplied.

Alignment is a pain in Blender

its done using shift + s in conjuction with moving object centres to the edge you want to align etc

If its duplicates of the same object, the array modifier or dupliverts is a good way of aligning them

6

Thank you for your responses.

I have another problem that’s cropped up.

How do I make multiple objects into one object? I know how to parent things, but I can’t figure out how to merge them into a single object.

How do I make two objects into one object?

7

You can align vertices in following way:

  1. Select vertices to be aligned.
  2. Hit s to scale.
  3. Hit axis in which they should be aligned.
  4. Hit 0.
  5. Hit Enter.

If you want to align objects, you could use Kloputils script or make your own.

You can make multiple separate objects into one by selecting objects to be joined by using shift while clicking the objects. After that you need to hit ctrl-j.

8

Select them both (shift key when selecting the second one) then ctl-J to join them.

9

Thank you other-Jack.

:slight_smile: