Blender Quicktip: Snap

Precision mechanical CAD tools come with a wide variety of snap tools.  Blender is relatively light in this department (its primary users are animators, not engineers) but there is a snap menu and it can be pretty useful.

The snap menu is in the object menu in object mode, and in the mesh menu in edit mode.  It can be summoned in either mode by pressing shift-s, however.  Here are your available functions:

Selection to Grid – In edit mode, each selected vertex will move to the nearest grid node.  In object mode, object pivots are positioned to the nearest grid node.  The grid in these matters is defined as whichever grid is visible in the current view.  This means that zoomed well away, the grid might be one meter spacing, and zoomed in it might be one millimeter spacing.  This can be irritating, but it’s better than nothing.

Selection to Cursor – In edit mode, selected vertices move to the cursor position.  In object mode, selected objects move so their pivots are centered on the cursor.  (The cursor is that little life-raft looking thing.)

Selection to Center – Again, affects vertices in edit mode, objects in object mode.  Moves all selected items to their geometric center.

Cursor to Selection – Moves the cursor to the center of the selected objects.  (If one object is selected, cursor moves to it.)

Cursor to Grid – Moves the cursor to the nearest available grid node, again dependent on which grid is the smallest visible.

Cursor to Active – Moves the cursor to the active object.  This is the most recently selected object in the case of multiple selections.

These snap commands are a lot more limited than many CAD tools, but they’re enough that an experienced user can recreate many of the more advanced functions with some slight of hand.  For a great example of that, see rab3D’s tutorials on Blender for Precision Modeling.