Nice thought to introduce rotating along an axis joining the first two points to rotate in the third. Alas, upon rotating in at the first point, I peered down to discover a worm crawling out of my can ;^( I've been assuming the same scale between my meshes, they're slightly off, and it's too early to determine if they're off uniformly or not, which would further compound the challenge. Just experimented a bit, I hinged the two meshes with the point constraint at the first reference point, rotated AND scaled mesh 2 to align the set of reference spheres, pleased to see the parent relationships allowed everything to stay together, reference marks didn't follow a separate scaling from the mesh! Pleased even more, it least it appears so at this point, that the third reference point is in the ballpark, scale appears in, meaning the difference in scale between the two meshes is uniform. I'd now simply like to rotate on an axis defined between reference nulls 1 & 2, to swing both 3s into position. How I do that?


Thanks, BTW, to Next Design for the link to the tut on alignment in Mesh Lab, which looks very friendly. I've learned a new term, "coordinate transformation", which I believe this function describes, but it appears I also need a scaling transformation. While the above workflow gets me there, it's accuracy relies on much eyeballing, ergo time, so what's really needed here is a process that only requires setting the three common reference points between the two mesh objects, then running one operation that scales, positions, and rotates everything to snap together in one operation. I read on a Blender forum about 3ds Max having an alignment tool that provides for each function, scale, rotation, and position, none of that in Maya? If nothing else, do appreciate help on how to rotate along an axis between two objects. I'm new here, very generous people on this forum, big thanks!

Benjy