Alignment of body/bodies with axis

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#1

Hello, I’m relatively new to Shapr3d (coming from SketchUp). I’m trying to figure out how to do some things that would be fairly trivial in SketchUp and struggling a bit, and was hoping for some ideas.

First, I’ve created a collection of wedge shaped bodies that I’ve aligned to make a fan shape that I would like to align on my Y/X axis (i.e., the bottom points of the fan on the X axis and the back left fan point on the Y axis). Here you can see it after I’ve made/aligned the bodies:

IMG_0084.PNG
IMG_0084.PNG2388×1668 572 KB

The closest I’ve come to this so far is to select all the bodies for a Move/Rotate operation, drag the anchor point to the lower left point, and rotate by eye (which isn’t easy with the 5 degree increments). Then do another move operation and drag the bodies along the X axis so the back left fan point is on the Y axis (again, by eye). Is there a better way to accomplish this?

Second thing I’m attempting is to align some other body on to my fan bodies to perform an intersect operation. The best way I’ve figured out how to do this is to union my wedge bodies into a single body (keeping the originals), create a flat bottom on the new body for alignment (connecting the lower fan points and extruding), then use the align tool to align the body on it that I would like to intersect. At which point I delete my unioned fan body and subtract from the collection of original wedge bodies. Any suggestions to make this operation easier?

Thanks,
– Charles

#2

Let me know if this is what you are trying to achieve.
First, I put all the bodies in a Folder. That way I can select all at once.
Then I drew a line on the X axis, then a line along the bottom edge of the bottom body.
The angle measured at 16.39°.
Then Move-Rotate the selected bodies by that angle, then re-align the Move-Rotate arrows so that you can rotate the group of bodies from the Z axis to the Y axis.
(I needed to make the video lo-res so it would be under 10mb for upload.)
-Mike

#3

Hi Mike,

Thanks for going through the effort to make that movie. Using lines to get measurements is an interesting thing I’ll have to adjust to (SketchUp has dedicated tape measure and protractor tools for such things). You didn’t do quite the same movements I’m after but in an abstract I think this will allow me to get what I want done for aligning to axis.

I was hoping for a nice align point on selection to axis feature though (perhaps I can draw a line on the axis and align to that, I’ll give it a shot although it doesn’t seem like the align tool works on multiple bodies). Perhaps some more features for the backlog if the devs are reading this (or upvotes on things already in the backlog).

Thanks,
– Charles

#4

Charles one thing you may find helpful is to double tap on a face so you go into 2D view. This makes alignments and intersections a lot easier.

If you are working with curved sides of objects you can create a plane and align to that.

This is similar to what TigerMike showed but using 2D view. One thing I did not get at first is once you tap on that face that is your reference plane. So lines, circles, etc will happen in relation to that plane.

#5

Thanks Yepher, that’s good to know. There’s a lot of implicit behavior to learn it seems.

– Charles