Precision modeling with Blender 3D: Script Lengthen

The quest for tools and techniques that helps us to model with precision never ends and part of this search in Blender is related to some nice scripts, which can really save a modeling that requires attention in the dimensions. Today I’m going to talk about a script called Lenghten, developed by Pedro Caeiro and that can set the distance between two vertices keeping them in the same orientation.  It works with the selection of two points, and when both points are selected we can set the distance between them to any value or a percentage of the actual measurement.

If you want to download the script, visit this thread at the blenderartists forums to get the last version of the script. To show exactly how it works, I had a few minutes left this morning and recorded a small video about the script.

To install the script, extract the “py” file to your Blender scripts folder and it will show up at the Mesh folder of the scripts Window. To use the script, follow those steps:

1. In edit mode, select a vertex and click on Pick 1 or Pick 2
2. Repeat the same selection until two vertices are selected
3. The Fix button determines if a vertex won’t be moved by the script. For instance, if the Pick 2 vertex has a Fix button pressed, then the script will move the first vertex.
4. Choose new distance from both vertices and hit Apply. If the % percentage button is pressed, the number used at the distance will be used as a percentage of the actual distance between the two selected vertices.

As you can see from the description and the video, this script is simple to use but quite handy for modeling. In architectural visualization projects we have to always keep track of the measurements of the project, which makes this script perfect to change the distances of the edges in a project to any exact measure.

Without this tool, we would have to work with other tools to set the distances between objects and doing that by setting coordinates and not distances most of the time.