I regularly use Blender+E-Cycles, but I recently got a license for Max and VRay hoping to round out my skills. Unfortunately, I’m having a little difficulty understanding some of the absolute basics about snapping. I wanted to post a video but since I’m a new user I can’t upload or link.
Anyway, envision a scene with just a cube in the center.
When snapping is enabled, and then I click on the Z axis arrow and drag, the cube will “jump” arbitrarily in the Z axis at the beginning of the move operation. This behavior gets extremely frustrating. Is this intended?
What you’re getting is a “sticky” preview of what you’re going to snap to.
If you press: Shift + Right Click, you can access the snap menu’s quickly, or right click on the snap button at the top, under the menu bar.
From that menu, you can control what you’re snapping to. I’m guessing you have ‘grid’ enabled, so as you move it’s snapping to nearest grid points. From the menu you can also control the preview distance, grid spacing, etc. Vertex is probably the most common snap to use, I never use grid. I also toggle snaps frequently depending on what I’m doing. ‘S’ shortcut key makes this very handy and easy to remember. I will also typically setup a hot key to toggle ‘Enable Axis Constraints in Snaps’. With those two shortcuts you can overcome most of the annoying quirks and work very efficiently.
In Max, you can also click and drag either an object, or a constraint to move and snap something, unlike Maya which requires much more clicking and selecting. It’s a simple press, hold, release operation which is very quick and efficient once you understand how it works; no need to select the object first.
Thanks a lot for the help! I’m slowly finding my footing with Max.
If you press: Shift + Right Click, you can access the snap menu’s quickly, or right click on the snap button at the top, under the menu bar. From that menu, you can control what you’re snapping to. I’m guessing you have ‘grid’ enabled, so as you move it’s snapping to nearest grid points.
I actually did this and disabled everything, but I still get the “jumping” behavior. All snaps are off (but global snapping is on) yet it seems like it’s trying to snap to something? I’m not quite sure exactly what’s going on.
Try this…
Create a new file and press “s” to enable snapping
Right click the snaps button and uncheck everything
Draw a cube into the scene
Try to move said cube on the Z axis using the gizmo
Notice the odd snap at the beginning of the move operation
Thanks again for the help, I really appreciate it.
I see what you mean. I think what’s going on here, is that with no snaps enabled, it’s defaulting to the objects pivot point. It’s aligning the pivot to your cursor like it would any other snap preview. And because your cursor is potentially farther away from the pivot, the jump seams larger than if you were snapping to vertex. I suppose technically it could be considered a bug, since there’s nothing you can snap to, so why bother aligning it. On the other hand, I guess it could also be useful, as it at least aligns the object pivot to be under your cursor so that wherever you release the button on the move is where the object’s pivot will end up.
You can see the same effect on vertex snaps, it’s just usually much smaller of a jump. If you turn the snap preview radius way up, and click farther away from the vertex to begin the move operation you will get a larger jump. As soon as you begin to move your mouse, the vertex will snap to be centered on the cursor position. It’s all part of the snap preview, and providing an accurate, real time update, so you know exactly what the result will be if you release your mouse button.
Now that I think of it, I think this is exactly why I frequently use the ‘s’ toggle to enable and disable snaps while I work. I’ve been using the technique so long that it’s second nature for me, and I’ve forgotten why I started doing it. But I think your observations and frustration with it are legitimate–I’ve just learned to work around it and didn’t even realize it.
That makes a lot more sense, thank you for explaining. It’s pretty trivial to just toggle snaps with “s” on and off as needed, so I’ll just go that route. I really like Max’s snapping system, it’s a lot more precise than what you can do with Blender. Thanks again for the reply.
While we’re on the topic of workflow, as someone relatively new to 3DS Max, I’d love to hear any suggestions for add-ons or scripts that make modeling / navigation / whatever easier. I just stumbled across rappatools and Project Manager 3 and they look amazing. Are there any “must haves” for someone working in Max?
Personally, I try and avoid using large tool collections, preferring to try and find ways to work with the native tools.
If there’s a specific task I need to perform often or that a tool saves a great deal of time on, I’ll definitely use it. But I typically go in search of solutions to known problems, whereas I feel many tools and plugins are solutions in search of a problem.
If you’re into modeling there are some invaluable modifiers. These have been consistently available and updated over time. Also very simple to install, unlike many script tools.
