This past week one of our newest developers, Pauli, worked his magic with the editor by building us a brand new feature: alignment. While Pauli has been knee-deep in Tinkercad’s To-Do list, he was able to come up for air to share with you how this fantastic new feature functions. Take a read then give it go!
Hi, Pauli here! I’ve been working on an align tool this week and we just deployed it this morning, so I wanted to tell you more about it. Let us know what you think!
Here’s how it works…
- When you have multiple objects selected, a little menu button appears in the corner of the selection frame:
-
Click on the menu button to enter Align mode. In this mode, a group of lines and controls appear around the selection:
- When you move a mouse over a line, it is activated. A preview of the alignment is shown using “ghost copies” of the selected objects:
- It’s a bit trickier to show the aligment in the Z dimension, because we don’t want to have the grid lines obscuring the selection. Currently it looks like this — you get a preview of the alignment plane in red:
-
There is also an alternative interface to the Align tool. Shift-click on the Align button to open a popup that shows the alignment possibilities. The labels have mouseovers so that you get the preview of where the objects would end up:
- The direct UI is clearly preferable for most situations, though!
Excellent new feature, can’t wait to try it out. Thanks!
Great! Let us know what you think =)
Hi Guys, nice work! It works well to align a row of text. Is there any way to set to equal spacing?
Thank you, shaunp! Not right now. You can copy and paste, tho, on the same axis.
This is great! Any way to align to a specific object rather than the average of all selected objects? Asked a different way, is there any way to align the center of Object A with the center of Object B without moving Object A? Thanks!
Hi Josh! Not …. yet! But this is a tool we’d LOVE to have and it’s on our list
+1. Need to be able to lock one of the objects at its current location and have the rest of the selection align to it. You already have a Lock feature but for some reason Align is disabled when any of the selected objects are locked. Great UI for the Align feature in general – best I’ve EVER seen in any program. Well done!
How does it select which object to align to? I had it use the right one for me once, but then I couldn’t get it to switch back? I thought the first object selected, the last object selected, but nothing seemed to change it.
The little menu control is not showing up for me when I select multiple items.. what could be the issue?
The little menu control is not showing up when I select multiple items .. What could be happening?