Snap To Object Add-On

This project is a small tool made for a 3D art and animation suite called "Blender 3D".

• Imagine a scenario where you are an artist working on multiple 3D models that need to be organized along the x, y, or z axis in the final scene. ie. designing a small city block may require organizing 3 or 4 building models along the x axis.
• The tool eases an artist's job by "snapping" selected meshes together - that is, properly stacking them along the specified axis. Currently, this tool works for every two selected meshes(so you cannot stack more than two meshes at a time). The last selected mesh will maintain its location in 3D space, while the first selected mesh will be pulled towards it.
• The tool allows some room for flexibility by allowing artists to add offset values. For example, to add space between buildings in a city block with ease, you can stack them with some offset between them.

Demos

First look at the tool

Other Issues

• To implement this tool to work on more than two meshes at a time, we need to know the order in which the artist selected those meshes in the first place. This information is not available with the Blender Python API - (looking into implementing a sub-tool for this, if possible).

Testing

1. Download Blender 3D, if you haven't done already
2. Clone the repository or download the file MeshAlign.py which can be found here
3. Open a new project and create a text editor window in the viewport, if you don't know how to do this you can check out free tutorials on the website
4. Upload the .py file and run the script
5. Once the script runs successfully, you can shift select any two object on the 3D viewport
6. Press space bar to bring up search menu and look for "Snap To Object"
7. You can check out the Demo section of this document for assistance