Jesse wrote:

> I like the new Align tool... it's like "Set Points" in Rhino,
> only it's easier to use and it works with other objects as well.
>
> Cool, now I don't need "Project to C Plane" anymore... :-)
>
> Nice job!

Thanks Jesse, I'm glad you like it. Yes, it is kind of a combination of Rhino's SetPoint along with a 2D Illustrator type bounding box alignment tool.

It can work for Project to cplane, but you will have to turn on all the points and select them (unless your object is already planar). That will work for now, but I think eventually there should be an actual project command as well. But I haven't quite figured out where to put a project to cplane command, there is a little bit of a conflict with a different type of project (for projecting a curve to a surface).

I've been meaning to post some pictures of what you can do using Align, since a lot of people are not familiar with SetPoint in Rhino. So here we go.

Let's say you have drawn this curve and moved some points around:




Now you want to do a revolve of this curve, but you want to tune up the points so that they are all lined up - you want the end points to be lined up vertically along the axis, and you also want the first two and last two points to be in a horizontal line so that the revolved shape will be smooth instead of come to a sharp point.

So first, select the endpoints, then you can run Transform/Align, and use the origin snap to line them up to the vertical axis (switch from the default "Horizontal" alignment in the upper-right options area to "Vertical center"). That will line up the endpoints to the axis:



Now select the upper 2 points and do Transform/Align, with the Horizontal option, and pick on the end of the curve:



Repeat for the bottom 2 points:



And there you have all those points squared up with the axis and with each other. So you can use this anytime you want points to be lined up in a straight line - sometimes this might be the last 2 points of a curve so that the curve's ending direction is set to be exactly horizontal or vertical, and you can also do this to several points in the middle of a curve to flatten out a region and make sure that there aren't any little wiggles in it.

- Michael