Hi Mike, also here's a demo of orient line to line in action:



It's not magic though, it's just bundling up a move plus a rotation plus a scale in a convenient way.

You can get the same result by doing a Transform > Move to first move that small curve so that it has one endpoint on top of the one of the other curve's endpoint, and then use Transform > Rotate to rotate it around that same point to point it how you need it, and then follow that with a Transform > Scale to resize it as well.

Orient line to line just combines those things together with fewer picks - with 2 lines that you pick it incorporates a move from the start point of the base line to the start point of the target line, then a rotation by the angle between the 2 lines, followed with a scale (which you can disable or switch to stretch or uniform scaling mode) by the difference in length between the 2 lines.

It can be particularly convenient if you want to do the kind of endpoint matching shown in the animation above, or also if you want to drop a bunch of copies of objects where you want to rotate and scale each one a little differently. When you turn on "make copies" you will then be able to spit out a rotated and scaled copy of the object by doing just 2 picks for a new target line for each copy.

- Michael

For me "Line Line" (+ 3 options) + "helpers lines" is the most very cool function for anything!
As soon as you want snap connect something, scale something, strecht something, move something, rotate something, modify homothetic something, copy place something, orient something, etc...
Infinite uses!
And all without cerebral reflexion, very more easy than the Edit Frame! :)
My first number one!

Thanks for the visual example Burr!

Works like a charm: :-)



I'll have to make it a point to include some of these alignment/orient tools in my workflow.

Thanks for the detailed explanation Michael - there appears to be many useful things that can be done with these tools.
You can also use C-Plane to draw 2D elements in any peculiar axis, say if you wanted to project shapes more cleanly to an angled surface.

Hi Mike,

> You can also use C-Plane to draw 2D elements in any peculiar axis, say if
> you wanted to project shapes more cleanly to an angled surface.

Yup! Basically anytime you would have been considering doing something like repositioning objects to align them to the world axes to do some kind of drawing operation and then putting them back in their angled position later, you can instead set the construction plane so that all your drawing and modeling commands will operate in that angled location directly.

That's usually quite a few less steps especially because it's easier to reset the cplane when you're done, you don't have to move any objects around.

- Michael