Hi Pilou, so maybe some of your confusion with the 3D orient tool is that you're focusing on edges of your base object, but by default the primary thing that is actually aligned to is surface normals if the object being snapped on to is made up of surfaces.
So for example placing the orientation picker x/y/z location to this spot here:
The default thing that will be aligned with is actually this surface here:
The yellow line here shows the surface normal direction of that yellow face:
So that's the direction that by default will get mapped to the target position's z axis, and if you place the target position on to a standalone curve, the target position z axis will align with the curve tangent.
If you wanted to align some other direction than that, you would need to adjust the base axis frame, you can do various things like rotate the an axis by 90 degrees around another axis until it has the orientation you want to use.
But instead you may find the other Orient Line To Line command as mentioned above to be easier for cases where you want to position 2 things that start out all in the same plane.
- Michael
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