Hello fellow blender users!
Could someone kindly tell me the preferred method of aligning vertices along a line, or point me to some good reading material about this subject? Attached is an image with an example of what I mean. It is a front view of a piece of an object. I’d like to quickly and precisely align each selected vertex in figure A with the line highlighted in figure B, changing only its Y position, as simulated in figure C.
The best method I’m currently aware of would be to copy the line, cut this new line at the Z position of each vert, then snap each vert to the new corresponding vert created by cutting the new line. Occasionally it wouldn’t be so bad, but I perform this operation multiple times on some models, and generally avoid doing it because of the time and effort it takes, and my models suffer from the imprecision. There’s got to be a better way, right?
You might be able to just rotate the blue dot line provided that the distance travelled isn’t going to be that far e.g.:
Snap the cursor to the pink vertex shown in figure A.
Set the rotation axis to be around the cursor.
Roate the blue dot line to match up with the yellow dot line.
Or maybe: extrude the vertices of the blue dot line, then use the knife tool to cut.
Otherwise you may want to look into the geometry script and play with the intersect function.
Thanks for that link, these look like they could be useful tools, and I might never have learned about their existence otherwise! The rotation trick is useful, but it isn’t as precise as I want, and least not unless the angle of the line in figure B is an easily-snapped-to number. Good idea though.
I was just posting to make sure I wasn’t missing some major feature of blender’s edit mode. I seem to run into a situation where I’d like to perform this action a lot, and wondered if there was a better way. If anyone else has additional information, I’d appreciate it!
A massive ridiculous workaround would be to multiply the mesh, separate the verts and then use the shrinkwrap modifier, but that would only work in very limited circumstances. I usually rotate them till they are relatively flat on my screen and then ‘s’ ‘z’ ‘-’ (scale on the z-axis to nothing) then rotate them back around to where they were. It’s not accurate enough in most circumstances as well. There is probably a proper feature for this.
Thank you all for these suggestions! I appreciate getting so much feedback and I really appreciate your time. Some of these ideas are things I had never considered, although I’m surprised to find that each solution seems to involve a similar amount of effort. I assume that this type of operation is meant to be avoided with good modeling practices, but it seems to come up often enough (for me anyway,) that I’m surprised there’s no project-this-on-that-along-axis or snap-this-to-that-along-axis function built in, given that the math involved should be fairly straightforward. The scripts Fade linked to look like viable workarounds for that shortcoming, and I plan on playing around with them as well as trying all of these alternatives to find which seems to work best!
Again, each of these sound like good ideas, and I definitely appreciate having some alternative methods to try out in the future! Thanks!
extrude the slanted line across past where you want the vertical line.
scale the extruded line to zero on the X or Y so it is a vertical row
3.snap the vertical line to match the top vert with the snap tool and CTRL key
then delete the line not used and merge the top and bottom points.
No scripts needed.
Does that help?
The rotation trick is useful, but it isn’t as precise as I want, and least not unless the angle of the line in figure B is an easily-snapped-to number. Good idea though.