Aligning objects.... and Hello!

[Sketchucate_me_please]

Hi all, I discovered Sketchup a couple of weeks ago.

Havin' great time playing with it (too much and too often), just for fun, but have run into the first issue for which I cannot find answers on the official Sketchup help pages, and for which I cannot find a YouTube video.

I would appreciate advice thanks.....

Unaware of whether there is a facility to post the Sketchup file in question for advice-givers to look at, I will try to describe it briefly.

Made a sphere and a ring-doughnut shape.
Placed the doughnut above the sphere (as though it were a "halo").
Made the doughnut into a group and made one copy of the original.

What I cannot do is find a way to align the 2nd doughnut to the sphere in exactly the same way as the original. The aim is to have 6 doughnuts whose relationship with the sphere is the same as the faces of a cube are to the centre of that cube.

How can I mark-up one item/group and align with with another whose edges are not straight?
The "bounding box" disappears from one item when I select another that I'd like to align with it.

Thank you for any links to this topic or specific answers (or questions regarding my question).

Many thanks.

[Dave R]

Something like this?

I started out with the first ring centered over the sphere. I made the ring in place above the sphere in my initial set up but you could move one or the other and use inferencing to get them lined up. Just make sure you grab the moving thing by a vertex that you'll align with a point on the unmoving thing. Use Shift (or the cursor keys) to lock the direction of the move once you've got it going in the right direction. It might take a couple of on axis moves to get it where you want. Not difficult once you get the hang of it but it's usually much less work to just draw the thing where you want it to begin with.

You might find all of this easier with hidden geometry turned on (View menu).

Select the ring and then get the Rotate tool. Get the tool oriented as needed. In this case I have the protractor displayed red for rotating about the red axis. I do that by adjusting my camera position so it will naturally turn red. Hold Shift to lock the orientation and click on a vertex on the sphere lined up with the center of rotation. At some point you also need to hit Ctrl (Option on Mac) to invoke the copy function. You can do this before hitting Shift or after clicking to set the center of rotation or even after you've started the rotation.

Make the first rotated copy, let go of the mouse and type 90. Hit Enter.

Immediately type *3 or x3 and hit Enter.

Select two rings opposite each other using the Select tool with Shift. Orbit so you can set the Rotate tool's orientation.

Repeat the copy process but this time you only need to make one copy rotated at 90°

Done.

[pilou]

Align and distribute by SDmitch

[cotty]

@sketchucate_me_please said:

Unaware of whether there is a facility to post the Sketchup file in question for advice-givers to look at, I will try to describe it briefly.

You can always attach (SketchUp-)files to your post (up to a max. filesize and up to 1600px max. dimension for graphics):

[Sketchucate_me_please]

Thank you
Dave R
Pilou
and
Cotty.