Week 3 Class Practical: Part 3 - Alignment

The next thing we covered in this weeks practical was the "Align Tool". This tool can be used to align 2 objects together using any combination of their different axis. To start, you have to select the object you want to move/align to another object and then shift select the target object for the alignment. Next, go to the "Modify" menu and select "Align Tool". This will bring up a set of handles used to control the alignment. Using these handles I have aligned the sphere to be right next to the cube in the pictures below.

Another way to align objects together is to use snap alignment. After selecting the 2 objects like in the previous example you can select the "Modify" menu, "Snap Align Objects" and "Align Objects" using the small square options window selection. This brings up another set of options for aligning the 2 objects together, specifically by aligning them in steps and applying those changes one by one. In the picture below I have achieved the same outcome as the align tool by selecting to "Stack" the 2 objects together in the world's X axis.

As a practice exercise for properly aligning models we were tasked with stacking up (from bottom to top) a cylinder, cone, sphere and cube using only the snap align objects window. At first this challenge proved very difficult, with the result either being that all 4 objects stacked together in the wrong order, or just merged together as one object. Eventually I worked out that by doing this in steps with the help of the outliner window to select each object I could stack them one by one using this tool. The first step was to select the object I wanted to move to the top of the stack, and the object I wanted to stack it on top of. Once I had done this, I had to first select the "Max" option, that would bring the object up towards the max height of the object I was trying to stack it on top of. After this step, I had to select the "Stack" option and only by doing these 2 steps in succession was I able to stack the objects in the correct order as shown in the picture below.