Align vertices?

rtweed

Is there a tool in Hexagon to align a set of vertices to the same plane?

I've just started modelling something and it's supposed to be flat, but I did it in the perspective view instead of an orthographic one, so it's a bit wonky and I want to flatten it. More generally I might want to occasionally flatten out sections of a model by selecting some vertices and then aligning them.

For that matter, I can't see anywhere to edit vertex coordinates numerically. Is that possible? Can it be done for multi-selections? In this case, if I could select the vertices and set all the Z coordinates to 0, that would do what I want.

useroperator

select the model, look to the top of the right side panel and you will see the properties area. that will show all the coordinate axis's of your selection.

my suggestion is you should spend more time familiarizing yourself with the various interface tools and options.

rtweed

user.operator said:

select the model, look to the top of the right side panel and you will see the properties area. that will show all the coordinate axis's of your selection.

Well firstly the question was about vertices, not objects.

Secondly, it seems I've run into some UI weirdness that is perhaps, just how Hexagon works, but it's not very intuitive. I had, of course, tried this already, but there were no numerical inputs in the properties panel. Because you seemed to be seeing something totally different than I was, I clicked the "abort" button and lo and behold, they appeared. It looks like this is because I had the tweak tool selected. It seems logical to have that tool selected since I'm trying to move vertices, but apparently doing so hides the numerical properties.

However, editing the "position" values allows me to:

- Set the position of the entire object
- Move the centroid of a group of vertices

(and if all vertices are selected, these are the same thing)

It does not appear to do what I want, which is to set a parameter for all selected vertices, e.g., set Z=0 for everything selected (what it will do instead is move all the vertices so that they have a midpoint of Z=0, but their relative positions are unchanged).

This is also with "absolute" checked, not "relative".

my suggestion is you should spend more time familiarizing yourself with the various interface tools and options.

My suggestion is that you don't make assumptions or include snarky comments in your posts, thanks. I am new to Hexagon, but I am certainly not asking stupid questions with answers that can be found anywhere. I have been through many video tutorials and read most of the manual (which I also searched for the answer to this question, but found nothing). Part of the process of familiarising yourself with the various interface tools and options is running up against problems like this, and not being able to find a solution is what these forums are for.

Ghostman

rtweed said:

More generally I might want to occasionally flatten out sections of a model by selecting some vertices and then aligning them.

What I usually do is to right click in the viewport and then chose Set Pivot. Shift click on the point that you want the rest to be aligned with. that will set the pivot to that vertice. Then select all the other points and use the scale tool to align the rest. If you hit the U key you will get the Universal Manipulator. It's good practice to have this one all the time since it speeds up the modelling in the end.

Theres lots of different ways to do things in hexagon but this is how I do it. ;)

rtweed

Ghostman said:

rtweed said:

More generally I might want to occasionally flatten out sections of a model by selecting some vertices and then aligning them.

What I usually do is to right click in the viewport and then chose Set Pivot. Shift click on the point that you want the rest to be aligned with. that will set the pivot to that vertice. Then select all the other points and use the scale tool to align the rest. If you hit the U key you will get the Universal Manipulator. It's good practice to have this one all the time since it speeds up the modelling in the end.

Theres lots of different ways to do things in hexagon but this is how I do it. ;)

Aha! Of course! Scale to zero in one dimension. I don't know why I didn't think of that.

It's actually really easy in the trivial case of flattening an object: you just select the object, choose scale and then enter zero in one of the dimensions.

Your tip for setting the pivot works really well for moving a sub-group into a particular alignment. Once you have the pivot set and the vertices selected, you can do the same thing: just type zero into one of the "size" dimensions to align them all with the pivot.

Of course if you want to align to an off-axis plane, you'd need to rotate the object first to align the plane with one of the axes, then undo the rotation afterwards to put everything back where it was. There might be a way to do the same thing my changing the local coordinate system and reset it afterwards, but I'm not sure if you can do that in Hexagon (it probably doesn't make the process significantly easier anyway except that the reset step should be one-click if your local coordinates are usually the same as world coordinates anyway).