Yes, I had the idea while working with Indesign and Illustrator when you need to cmd+G to group the selection then use the align tool.

You could also right click on any align tool to trigger it "move as group" maybe ?

Often I find the align tool far more precise and faster than the move tool since you don't have to pick a basepoint :)

In the last few days I've been thinking of something in line with what you are talking... an align to object, i thought of it as a point align that moves the points to the closest points on an object. It can be in this order: you make a point selection, then trigger the command and select an object to project the points. Reading this I think maybe it could work with curves and solids too. Maybe it could work inside the move command...

Hi ed, yeah I've thought some before about a kind of "snap to curve" mechanism for Align, but I haven't quite got it all figured out how it would work yet. One problem is that Align already has a lot of options and adding too enormous amount of options to any one single command tends to be unwieldy.

> Reading this I think maybe it could work with curves and solids too.

There is already a command for projecting a curve onto a solid, it's under Construct > Curve > Project.

- Michael

I'm talking of something like "move to closest point on object", without deforming. If you have for example two circles you could pick one, trigger the command, choose the second one and then MoI moves the first circle to barely touch the second one.

Hi ed, I see - something like that I guess would probably fit under a kind of "collision detection" or "point of first contact" mechanism. But unfortunately it would be a pretty major undertaking to make one that worked on all cases, a convex shape like a circle is not so difficult but to do a proper job on arbitrary shapes that have little bits and pieces sticking out at various spots becomes a much different matter.

If you just want to do 2 circles like you mention, you can do that particular case already with the Move command - start up the Move command and before picking the base point drag out a construction line between the origin point of both circles, it will then intersect the circles at the "closest point" spots and you can snap on to those intersection points.

There may be other already existing solutions for other kinds of shapes as well, if you have some particular example other than the circles where this would be useful if you could post that I'll see if I can give you a solution or it may help to get some idea on if there is some particular feature that could be developed to use as one step of the solution.

- Michael

It was just an idea. I saw some potential on that because it is very intuitive, it works like objects in real world, as you said, like collisions. Now, for the points it could be very helpful to have something like you described before, an align to curve... it may be a project to closest point on curve, but again, just an idea that came to my mind when using MoI, nothing that cannot be done right now but with more steps... Thanks for your replies.