Hi guys, welcome to The Snapping Tool! In this
video we're going to learn another way for you guys to constrain your
movement. We're going to be using the Snapping Tool to do that.
I'll show you how to snap objects into place and how to tell it
what to snap to, and controlling whether
or not you merge vertices, when you put the two things on
top of one another. So let's hop over into Blender!
So I don't want to start adding random things to our
pyramid, so let's open up a new Blender file.
So I'm going to go and save my pyramid first. As always,
saving is important. I'm going to go to New and load up a new
Blender file. So we have one cube here. By default,
snapping is turned off, and you can find the Snapping Tool
along the 3D Editor Header, towards the right-hand side.
It looks like a picture of a magnet. When it's turned on, it
even looks more like a magnet and that's exactly what it is. And we can see the
shortcut is Shift and Tab. Now this is one of those
shortcuts, which is incredibly useful because when we start moving
our object, this 3D Editor header
disappears. So let's demonstrate that now! If I go
and move my cube, you can see snapping is actually turned on, and it's actually snapping
into the grid in front of us, so it's moving one Blender unit at a time,
in a random direction. If we constrain it to Z it will be
locked in the Z axis. So by knowing
Shift and Tab, we can turn that on and off to our
heart's content, even if we've started the movement without
it being turned on. Perfect!
So the other options, what else can we snap to? Well we're going to need something
else to snap this cube to, and we can pick Faces,
Edge, or Vertex. So let's generate another cube
in our scene.
And let's lift that up, and we can see snapping's turned on.
That's kind of cheating because, of course, I can align that absolutely perfect.
There we go, perfectly aligned! But we want to know how to use these
other options here, so let's make it not so perfect and dump it
some random place over there. Because once you've done that and you start moving it
with the snapping turned on, they won't line up again, because it's
one Blender unit relative to where its new position was.
So if we pick a face and we can then
move this model... I'm just using moving as an example, but it can
be any one of the rotations, scaling, etc.
If I move the cursor over this face
and click, that cube is now against that face
perfectly! If I want it to be a bit more precise I could go to Edge,
and when I go to move it then... Ah, do bear in
mind, the position of your cursor. It's going to be very snappy and jerk all over the place,
if the cursor's over the top of your object when you start the move. But if the
cursor's away from your object, then you can place it over and you can see it
ping snaps into place. And now those two cubes
are basically, they're face planted together which is great,
and these edges are on top of one another. So I could grab it and
lower it down to this edge, or I could be even more precise in going, I want a
Vertex. I want to snap to the vertex, and
down in this bottom corner here. So again, we can move it and point it at that
and click, and now these two cubes are exactly aligned.
The final thing to mention here is, if we
join these two objects together,
so they become one object, and then go into Edit Mode,
we can see they've still got 16 vertices. So
let's go and combine another cube, and
see what happens when we've got the "Automatically
merge vertices moved to the same location" toggle turned on. And that's this
button next to the Snapping Tools to the right. So let's generate
another cube whilst in Edit Mode.
And let's move it over there,
so we can see there's 36 Edges.
Now if we move it, so it's against this cube and let go, it
drops down to 32 edges and it's become part of
the thing we've snapped it to. Now there are going to be times when you do want that to
happen, and there are going to be times you don't want that to happen. Remember
but if you do want to go back later on, you can always go down and
Remove Doubles in your scene, but if you know
that you want it to be joined together straight away, so then we can lift this one up by
a Blender unit and create a kind of a ducting type shape.
Then, brilliant, you can do that straight away without having to go over and Remove
Doubles and then do it.
So one final thing with snapping! So I'm just going to
add... I'm going to go into Object Mode here and just add
another cube to our scene. And it's just placed it where the
3D Cursor happens to be. I'm just going to drag it out of the way here.
Now I'm going to turn the snapping to Vertex, and
we're going to use that and make sure the snapping's on. Now notice to the right of it, it says
Closest. Now what that basically means is, if I
start to move this, so I'm going to press the G key for moving,
and I move it close to this edge here you see it snaps. But I want
this vertex, this one in the corner here, to snap to that one there.
And you can see, when I'm moving it,
it's not doing that it's moving the other one across,
so occasionally you have to wiggle things about. Now that this vertex
here is the closest to this one, when I try and move it and move my cursor
over that corner, it snaps in place, and that's
similar if you need to place something. If I need to put that
vertex in that corner just there and
let's say I want to place it all the way over this side,
and I'll just use G and move it here, you see that the cube ends up right
on the other one and I don't want that. So you need to move it to this side of it
so that this vertex is closest,
and then press G to move and move it across and snap it in
place. So it can be a bit picky, at times, if one
of your vertexes is closer than the other or edges closer. And there are a couple
of other options here, but generally Closest is good enough.
to get you there. So play about with snapping and you'll soon get the hang
of which bit will snap to what, and if you need to move something like
here. If I wanted to now move it to this one here,
well that's not what I want at all! So I'll move it across here and
probably going to have to shove it along here a little, and then grab
it and move it across. I've now got it in place! So it can be
a bit picky, but you'll get the hang of it in no time at all.
So let's hop over to our pyramid and do a little
challenge!
So what would I like you to do with your pyramid? Well we're going to create that
ramp now and merge it in with the rest of our model. So using
the Snapping Tool, I'd like you to extrude your ramp to the right height,
and then join up the top and bottom edges so that the
bottom edge meets the floor and the top edge meets the actual step
at the very top. So it's a continuous ramp from the top step
to the floor, and I do suggest keeping it a 45 degree
ramp. This is all part of planning our model because if
we make it any but a 45 degree ramp the steps, that we're
going to put on it in a bit, will be much more difficult to make, because
we're going to have to do a different ratio to step, not 1 up and 1
across. More on that later.
OK, just so you guys know
what sort of shape we're going for on the ramp, this is what my end
scene is going to look like, with that ramp on there at 45 degrees,
as you guys can see here. So go ahead, pause the video now, and give
that a go!
Welcome back! Let's hop over
into Blender!
So let's open up our
pyramid.
Let's go ahead and select our ramp
and extrude it up! But how far do we extrude?
Well let's have a look! Let's switch straight over into Orthodgraphic
projection and have a look at our model from the side. So
let's extrude up, and lets...it's going to be
about there, so it's level with those steps.
We're going to have to turn the Snapping Tool on, for a start. We're going to need to
line it up with an edge somewhere. So let's
extrude up and select this leading edge here, at the very top.
And that's lifted it up to the right height, but unfortunately,
it hasn't joined it
at the top or the bottom, so we need to do that
now. So we can select the top edge, make sure Edge Snapping is
turned on, and literally, move one over the other
and it's going to snap in place. Now before I do that, I'm just
going to press Escape to cancel the move, I'm going to merge the vertices, because I do
want that to become one object. So I'm going to move it again over
the top there and click.
There we go! So that's all together, that's the top bit done! However,
let's go to the bottom one now and see what we can do there.
Let's go all the way down here. So we can see, because we've planned our
model to be 1 by 1 by 1, and we know this is a very
geometric shape, it's perfect because we can just go
straight back. Because we zoomed in we've got all these smaller squares, we can
switch back to Increments, grab the front
edge here, flip back to the side, and
go down a little until we're flat with the floor, and then out
until we're level with one Blender unit.
And let's zoom back out. Now we've got our step completed almost.
Now switch back to Perspective Mode. We
need to change the normals for our step, we've inadvertently
created something with the normals pointing inwards. I can tell that by the
color, but you can double-check by turning the little hairs for the normals on.
However, I'm just going to select my entire model
and use the shortcut keys Control and N to make
sure that all of my normals are facing outwards. I'm
going to deselect and just check it over again. That looks perfect!
How did you guys get on? I shall see you in the next lecture!