Bryce 5 - Aligning Objects

Requirements: Bryce 5

This tutorial is for the Beginner

Aligning objects is pretty in-depth! There is Ground, Land, World Center, Grid, all of the X,Y,Z axis...whew!

Don't panic! We are only going to practice some really easy alignments in this tutorial just to get a feel for aligning objects quickly. For more detailed information on aligning objects, check the Bryce 5 Help documentation.

Okay, lets stack some objects and get a feel for alignment. Start off with a new document and set your view to Director's View so that you can use the camera as a guide. You should have a plane (represented by a grid) and the blue square representing the camera. Click on Create and select the Cube. It should appear in the center of your scene. In the Edit tool bar, use the Reposition tool to move your cube somewhere…anywhere. Now add a Pyramid by clicking on the Pyramid shape in the Create menu bar. Move it over somewhere else for now. We want to un-align the objects so that we can get some practice lining them back up again.

Follow these links if you need help with positioning or selecting objects.

Right now the pyramid is selected since we created it last. Let's select the cube instead. In the Edit Menu, with the cube selected, click on the small white down arrow next to the Align tool and choose Snap to World Center. This places the object at X=0, Y=0, Z=0 - World Center. But if you notice, this puts the object somewhat below our ground plane. So once again use the down arrow and choose Snap to Ground. Now the cube is in the center of the scene at ground level.

Let's top it off with the pyramid. Select the pyramid and do the same two alignment steps that you did for the cube: Snap to World Center and Snap to Ground. Your pyramid should now look like it is inside of the cube. Use the Reposition tool's upper Y-axis to move the pyramid up into the air above the cube. Back to the Align tool's drop down menu again, and this time use Snap to Land. Because we did not rotate either the cube or the pyramid, the pyramid lands on the cube and they should line up perfectly. This method works well if you have not resized and/or rotated either object.

Another helpful alignment trick is to use an object as an anchor and align another object to it that way. Let's delete our cube and pyramid and create a Cone and a Sphere. Move them apart for practice purposes. Now instead of using World Center to align these two objects, we will use Anchor-Based Aligning. In the Align tool's drop down menu, select Anchor-Based Aligning. When selected, it will have a check mark by it. The first object that you select is going to be the anchor. The other object will move to align with the anchor. Click on the cone to select it, then holding down the Shift key, click on the sphere. Both objects should now be selected. Use the Align tool drop down menu and choose Snap Together. Your sphere should move over to the cone and line up perfectly. This method is great for objects that have been resized and/or rotated because they will always line the objects up at the X,Y,Z center coordinates of both objects.

As you can see in my example at the top of this page, I have used a cylinder that I resized and elongated and then aligned a sphere to it's center point. I also changed the dimensions of a pyramid and then aligned another pyramid to it's center. These alignment tricks are very handy for creating your own objects from the available shapes.

Align some shapes, add some textures and lighting effects and you can make almost anything!
Not a great looking lamp, but you get the idea. ;-)