Using the FREE Align Tools Add On for Blender Aligning Objects in Blender

What's up guys? Justin here with theCGEssentials.com. So in today's video we're going to check out a free add-on included in Blender that can help you align objects. So let's go ahead and just jump into it. To enable Align Tools, what you do is you go up to Edit, Preferences, and you want to look for Align Tools. So it's going to be under Object, Align Tools. You want to make sure that you enable that. So this should be built into any version of Blender that you have, assuming that you don't have one of the super old versions. And so what that's going to do is that's going to add an option under your item menu on the right-hand side of the page for Align Tools. And what this does is this allows you to align different objects. So let's say, for example, that we've got cubes like these. They're kind of all over the place. So we'll go ahead and give them a little bit of up-down as well. So nothing's really aligned about these. Well, what you can do is you can select a series of objects. So like, for example, I'm going to select all of these boxes. And first off, notice how what it's going to do is when you have multiple objects selected, it's going to tell you what the active object is, which I think is really helpful. I think that's something that you can kind of get confused about sometimes. So in this case, it says that my active object is cube 01. Well, down below, what that's going to do is that's going to give us options for aligning different aspects of the objects. So, for example, let's say that we wanted these all to be on the same plane. Well, what we can do is there's an option here for align location. What that's going to do is that's going to take the location data of the active object, and it's going to align all of those objects with that object. So notice how now, because this was our active object, all of these have the same Z location as that object. So we could also do this with, like, the X axis. So if we wanted these to all be in a line, what it's going to do is it's going to align the location of those objects. And one thing that I'm not 100% sure about, let's kind of play around with that right now, is I think that it's in this mode, I think it's aligning the object origin. So if you select all of these, so this, this, this, and this, so this is our active object, and we try to align our X location, well, we'll do the Z first, but then if we try to align our X location, notice how what it's doing is it's coming in here and it's aligning the object origin. So if your objects aren't aligned like this, it's because the object origin isn't centered on the object. So there's a lot of ways you can fix that. In this case, I'm just going to set the origin to the center of mass volume, and then if we were to try to align these, we could quickly align the X location like this. Whoops. And so another cool thing about this is not only does it allow you to align the location, there's also an option here to align rotation. So let's say that you had, so we've got all these Suzannes in here, right? And if we look at them, they're all rotated in a different way. They've all been kind of rotated all over the place. I could rotate it more if I wanted to, something like that. Well, what we can do is if we were to select all of these objects and then select this last Suzanne as our active object, well, notice how now if I click on Align Rotation All, what it's going to do is it's going to take those objects and it's going to align the rotation data of those objects to the same thing as this one right here. So now, like if I was to click on these, right, you can look at the transform information in here, and it basically sets the transform information to the same setting. And so let's say I was to rotate the origin so that it's not aligned the same way that it was before. Well, now the issue that you're going to have here is now if we do an Align Rotation All, notice how this object isn't aligned with this object right here because the Z axis was facing a different direction when we started. So just be aware if you do have something that isn't working for whatever reason, it may be because your object origin rotation is messed up. And so just be aware that that's how that works. And so in addition, there's also an option here to align the scale. So we've got all of these objects in here, right, and I've scaled them all to different sizes. Well, what we can do is we can select all of these objects like this, and then we can click on Align Scale, and what that's going to do is that's going to scale those objects to the same scale as the active object right here. So you can set this to scale all objects to the same size. Now, one thing I'm not sure about, though, is if I do an Apply Rotation and Scale to this and then do this. So if I have all these selected, now I try to align the scale. Notice how you're going to get a different result in here. So usually when you make those changes, if you're going to do an Align Scale, you don't want to apply the Rotation and Scale before you do this. And so one of the things that I think a lot of people don't know about that makes this really powerful is not only do we have options in here to do what we just talked about, right, you can also use advanced align tools. And so let's say we were to select all of these and have our plane be our active object, like this. Well, instead of clicking on one of these options, we're going to click on the Advanced function. Well, if I look at the Advanced function, notice this is going to give me options for aligning different things, right? So, for example, what it's been doing is it's been aligning our object. You can also set it to align the object pivots, if that's something you want to do, or the cursor. Or, down below, you can also set if these even align based on that location. So notice how when I clicked on this, what this did is this aligned all of my objects, right? Well, typically, what this would do is this would align based on the pivot location, right? It typically wouldn't be the minimum. Well, the problem with that is say we were trying to align these with this plane right here. Well, the problem with aligning these with this plane right here is it's aligning them based on the origin, right? Meaning the objects are halfway through the plane. However, if we were to select the option for minimum instead of pivot, notice how what that's going to do is that's going to drop these down and it's going to align the Z axis based on the minimum point on these objects. So if you were to set max, it would give you the other way, right? So these would be underneath, right here. And so what that does is that gives you even more options for doing things with complex geometry. So for example, we could do the same thing with these spheres and we could use this in order to align the spheres with our plane. So we would just select all of these, click on advanced align. Well, notice how we can use the minimum function in order to align the bottom of our spheres with the surface. So you can use this to quickly drop objects to surfaces inside a blender. So in my opinion, this is one of the more helpful add-ons contained inside a blender, but I'd love to hear from you what you think about this in the comments down below. I will link to some other add-on videos as well, including one where I talk you through 20 of the top free add-ons that come with blender. As always, thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and I will catch you in the next video. Thanks, guys.