In this video, we are going to discuss basic snapping techniques. To turn on snapping, you can press this button up here that looks like a magnet icon. This is on and this is off. If you prefer shortcut, you can press Shift Tab to toggle the snapping on or off the button on the right side, we'll open the panel where we can access the options for the snapping feature. In render, we can snap to different things. Here we can choose whether we want to snap based on increment, snap to vertex, age, face, etc.

You can also turn on more than one of these options. If you hold shift and then click on any of the options, it will toggle them on or off. You can also hold shift and just click drag like this if you want to. below it. You can see the options for the current snapping mode. This option will change depending on what snapping modes that are currently active up here.

In this lesson, we will focus only on the vertex snapping as this is probably the most often used snapping mode when doing 3d modeling. vertex snapping simply means that we are targeting a vertex to snap to. If you have the vertex snapping active here, you can see in a snap with options down here, closes, center, median, and active. Now to be able to see the difference between these snap with options, especially these last three options, we need to have multiple objects selected, otherwise they will produce a similar outcome. So here I have a total of four cubes. If we want to do snapping, we need to select the objects that we want to move or snap.

So I select these three cubes here, the left cube will be our target object. Let's activate the move tool here. So we can see the pivot point location. Make sure the snapping mode is on. For now, make sure this option aligned rotation to target is off. We will discuss more about this later.

Let's activate the closest option here, cause this means that Blender will determine which point from the selected objects closest to the target vertex and use the reference to move the object. When we press G and move our mouse cursor to this vertex location, we can see brander use this point to snap to the vertex under our mouse cursor. Next is the center option. The center option will basically use the current pivot point or the transformation center as the reference to moving the object to the target. So this option actually depends on the pivot point settings we have up here. If we set this to a bounding box, for example, we can see the transform the small move slightly if we press G, and then move our mouse cursor On this vertex at the left cube, the selected cubes will be moved to align the pivot point to the vertex location here.

Next is the median option, the median option will use the center of the selection as the reference point, it doesn't really care about the pivot point. But if you have the pivot point here, set to median like this, then both the center option and the median option are now basically the same. So if we press G, and then move it again like before, we'll get something like this. Finally, the active option, this option will use the active object or the active element. If you are in the edit mode as the reference to snap to the target. We can see now the active object is this one.

If we press G, and then try to move the mouse cursor to this vertex again, the selection move on based on the location of this active object, okay, so that is the difference between each of the snap with options. But before we move on, there is something I need to explain about the closer setting here. You see, if you are in object mode, this closest setting will work on the bounding box of the selected object, not on the actual closest vertices. Here, I have a monkey head object, if I move it like so, this vertex on the mouth should be the closest vertex to this vertex here in the cube, right. But if you press G and move the mouse cursor onto this vertex, the monkey head snaps like this. It doesn't use or detect the vertices in the monkey model.

Again, this is because in the object mode, the bounding box will be used instead. If you want to see the bounding box of an object, you can go to the object panel here. viewport display section, you can turn on these bounds option here. So this invisible bounding box is will actually be used in a snapping calculation when we have the closest option active. However, if you are inside the edit mode, this will be a different story, render will actually calculate the closest vertices between the selected mesh and the target vertex. So if I hold shift and select this cube here, and then press Ctrl J, we just combined the objects so now the monkey mesh is inside the cube object.

If we press tab to go to the edit mode, press one to go to Vertex mode, then our A to D select all if we hover over one of the vertices here, and then press L to select all linked elements. Then press G to move we can see the closest vertex we have in a selection precisely snap to the vertex in the cubes corner which is nice. We will use this vertex closes snapping method a lot later in the next project. Now let's discuss this option align rotation to target. If we have this option turned on, the objects will not only change their location, but they will also rotate to align to the normal direction of the target vertex. Now, if you do this on the cubes, because the normal directions of the vertices at the corners are diagonal, it's kind of hard to tell the difference.

To see this more clearly. I already prepared a large sphere object here for the target and also a code object that we can move around. Make sure this aligned rotation to target is on for the snap with option because we only have one object selected. It doesn't really matter which of these three active but let's just use center for now. Press G and move the mouse cursor to any of the vertices in the sphere, you can see that Blender detects the vertex normal direction and automatically aligned the orientation of the cone object. This is useful for placing details on 3d surfaces such as screws, nails, rocks, mushrooms, etc.

But for placing objects on surfaces, you generally want to activate the face snapping mode here and not the vertex mode. The last thing I want to discuss in this lesson video is how to use the snapping mode temporarily. For this, you can use the control modifier key when moving the objects but this control key method actually works by negating or flipping the current snapping mode. So before you use it, you need to actually turn off the snapping mode first, otherwise pressing Control will actually be activated. So when moving this object for example, if you hold Ctrl, we can see the snapping mode becomes active, we can see the object snaps. If we release the Ctrl key, the snapping will turn off again, this feature is very handy, because when modeling, we don't always need the snapping feature.

So instead of going back and forth to the snap button up here, or pressing Shift Tab, just hold control when moving objects or mesh elements to temporarily activate the snapping mode.