Snapping instances to existing geometry

[goldmandarin]

I have a tree with leaves.  The leaves are nine poly patches with individual borders, but they are one piece of geometry.  each plane in the piece of geometry has it's own uv shell but they all over lap.  What I want to do is extract on leaf an then instance it to all the others, hopefully being able to follow the orientation of the leaf I am snapping too.  Any thoughts?  Looked at various tools out there.  Haven't found one that suits the task.  I am not opposed to writing one, but I am not sure how to tackle the issue.  Any help would be great.

[joojaa]

Well its really hard to tell how i would apperocah this since i cant see the nature of your data. But yeah its possible lots of apporaches tough.

So question number one, are ALL the polyygons identical in shape (except rotation/scale?)

[goldmandarin]

yes they are the same geometry.  I can't release the file.  What else might I supply you with to help?

[joojaa]

Ok

calculate one vector form leaf tip and one vector foer leaf witdth then cross product that, make the vectors unit length and this forms your rotation matrix, feed tis to a decompose matrix node for rotation, match one point for translation.

Or if they deform more than that such as skew use least squares method.