Auto Align

A blender add-on that automatically re-aligns wrong axis objects.

Usage

There are three options available in the 3D Viewport > Sidebar > Item > Auto Align.

• Rotate : Rotate the selected object to match the world axis.
• Rotate & Bake : Same as Rotate, but rotation is applied.
• Keep Position & Bake : Keep the object fixed and only change the local axis.

Also there is a symmetry option. This option can be used to align symmetrical objects, even though there are not many orthogonal faces to the axis. It's a bit slower, but effective when aligning organic objects, such as people.

Note

• The object should be symmetric or have enough orthogonal faces.
• When using symmetry option, the model doesn't need to be completely symmetrical because the algorithm considers the outlier.
• The symmetry plane detection algorithm is far from perfect. If the object is complex (>10⁵ vertices?), symmetry detection will fail with a high probability. Also, if a single object has multiple planes of symmetry, the alignment can be done in an unintended manner.

Algorithm

Orientation

The proper orientation of the object is calculated as follows:

1. RANSAC (Random sample consensus)
2. Randomly select two orthogonal faces to create a candidate orientation.
3. Find the faces that corresponding to the axis within a specific threshold (<5 deg).

4. Criterion is to maximize the sum of the areas of the face.

5. Correction

6. Fine-tune the candidate orientation.
7. Find the weighted median of the points on each axis and rotate the orientation.

8. Repeat until convergence.

9. XYZ adjustment

10. To avoid continuous flips and maintain consistency while repeating the same operation.
11. Determine XYZ axis to have the least difference from the initial mesh orientation.

For each object, only up to 10⁴ faces are considered in the process. This is due to performance reason. If there are more than 10⁴ faces, larger faces would be considered first.

Symmetry Plane Detection

When the symmetry option is on, the symmetry plane must be derived before RANSAC.

1. Vertex pair matching
2. Randomly extract vertex pairs that satisfy symmetry conditions.
3. Vertex normals must be consistent with their relative positions.
4. Plane voting
5. 4 parameters of fitting plane is calculated from each pair.
6. From 4D voting space, choose plane parameters that receive the most votes.
7. Correction
8. From the planes within a certain distance, calculate the median of each parameter.