Extrude & Align? Simple snapping /noob level

In a situation like this:


For the diagonal brace, I’d like to grab the ends of a cube (circled), and snap AND align the end-face to the upright column and the …other bit.

What’s the proper tools/workflow? Snapping is easy-ish, but the align part is escaping me.

Tnx.

hmm interesting snap to face centered doesn’t work, but snap to edges centered… so you may produce a temporary edges at the 3D cursor, snap one face to this edge… ans so on…

This is not an answer to the aligning / snapping question!

For these shapes I’d be tempted to use a boolean modifier.

  1. Edit mode: extend the end of the diagonal brace into the vertical beam.
  2. Object mode, add a boolean modifier on the diagonal brace
  3. difference it with the vertical beam
  4. apply

Like I said, a solution but not an answer.

That seems like using a hammer to swat a fly. Surely there’s a way to SNAP & ALIGN the end Faces to another Face.

1 Like

Afaik there is no way to do so, even if this would work it would distort the thickness when it rotates the face to align the target.
Easiest would be the bool tool addon.

Okay, have to rotate a bit… but wasn’t there some aligning tricks…(?)

@Okidoki If you use the local gizmo (instead of the default global) and select the lower edge, you can move that edge towards the object to which you want it snapped. I’ve had luck with snapping “edge” to “active object” in this fashion, 4 edges, 4 moves, moving the lower edges with one axis of the local gizmo. No rotations to clean up afterwards.

@Jeric_Synergy, I would say the boolean modifier is more like the perfect chop saw.

Oh yes different Transform Orientation… hmm doesn’t work for me…

Oh, making a new Transform Orientation for the target face and then snapping the edges of the unrotated face to the target face Z-orientation works pretty well… Of course the new beam does shear a bit so it’s not perfect but nice… :slight_smile:

You could activate snapping to face and then slide every vertex individually onto the other beam (g-g-c):


edit: and if the beams are aligned as in the original post, then you can achieve the result by sliding two of the edges instead.

Select the “cutting” or junction faces, press ctrl+f and intersect boolean.


Just need to clean up to get what you want.

1 Like

Select and subdivide the inside vertical lines of each column. Inset a new face on each, then size and position them where you want the diagonal brace to be. Then just bridge the two faces.

This works with that case, but wouldn’t with a different shaped part. A tube for example.

I have to agree with @rigoletto :

  1. extrude the cube into the adjacent beams
  2. duplicate the beams, select the beams and the cube, the cube last
  3. press ctrl-shift-minus
  4. done

(using the Booltools addon, of course, and having both beams and the cube be separate objects)

This is a valid approach for this simple sample object w/only 4 points. But what if it were a cylinder w/32 points?

An approach that snapped AND ALIGNED would be preferred, although come to think of it, and extrusion (to maintain dimensions) that snapped and aligned would be the best case.

Not really efficient, but you could do this:

  1. extrude once, and add all of the newly created vertices to a new group (ctrl-g)
  2. add a shrinkwrap modifier with
    target: the beam you want to align to
    wrap method: project, and choose the axis in whose direction you were extruding:
    vertex group: the group we just created

Edit: And if you have MESHmachine installed, you can use the conform tool to speed up the process:

  1. stash the target beam to the cube
  2. select the face you want to align with the beam
  3. choose conform with
    “project” and “do not remove modifier”
  4. change the project axis in the newly created modifier
  5. apply the modifier

Im personally would use MACHIN3tools addon and “Slide Extend” tool.
Self explanatory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaeUiESyRFE

1 Like

Man I should really watch Machin3’s videos more closely, I was so close to raising a feature request for this in the Machin3tool thread :slight_smile:

That works, but is very confusing: this is not the behaviour I expect from a Union operation, as portions of the cutting geometry are removed, which seems not very “Union”-y.