How to rotate to align meshes

[zoe.nelsonP754P]

I'm a game dev student and I downloaded a free ant model for use in a personal project. 

It was one single mesh so I selected it, separated it, and there seems to be some history that it remembered all the pieces so that's wonderful that they're all easily select-able.

The issue I have is that the head of the ant is not aligned to the axis. There is no history on it that I can easily change the rotate back to the center. The pivot is set to the origin for every one of the polySurfaces.

Head mesh pieces selected

I've tried the various align and snap tools and those only seem to be for moving along the axis, not rotating. Is there some simple way that I'm missing to be able to select say, the centerline of the head, the centerline on my plane and say, "align edge A to edge B"?

I can move the pivot and rotate the head by eye but it's not perfect, and I'm thinking with all Maya's capabilities, there has to be some tool that I'm just not seeing or using properly.

Maybe one of the point snap aligns?

Thank you in advance!

[brentmc]

Hi,

You can do this with custom pivots in Maya.

1) activate the Move tool in object-space 
2) tap D to enter pivot editing mode
3) click on a vertex to set the center of rotation
4) Ctrl-click on the edge you would like to align to set the orientation
5) Bake pivot to set the object's transformation
6) Modify the rotation in the channel box to re-align the object
7) Freeze Transformations to bake the rotation back into the geometry