Blender School: Oh Snap!

Next lessons: Snapping 

I'll be honest: I've hardly ever used the Snap function. I've usually wiggled things into position without a lot of precision. It's time to do things properly.

This is what Blender Bros. Josh taught me about snapping:

1. You can invoke snap by pressing Ctrl while moving an object. The movement will adhere to the current Snap type, increments by default.

2. While increment means that you snap to your scene's grid, the other snap types relate to other objects in a scene. Vertex snaps to the vertex of another object, likewise with a face.

3. If you select Face projection snapping, you need to tick  Align Rotation to Target. That said, I'm not yet sure how you get this to work in the expected manner.

Most of the time, you'll be using vertex snapping because it's quick and precise.

Origins and Cursor

Very important!

Yet another super-useful pie menu from Machin3tools:

Shift + S

The 3D Cursor is an arbitrary point that you can place anywhere in the viewport space. It has X, Y, and Z coordinates. You place it with the mouse. Point to a location and press the Shift+Right mouse button. The cursor is used as a placemark, where you can move an object or an object's origin to it.

The origin is an object's median point; essentially, it's a dot at the object's centre. This is used as a reference point for any kind of translation. You can move the origin for things like pivot operations.

Tip: Shift+S, then Cursor to Origin, will return the 3D cursor to the VP grid's origin if you don't have an active object selected. Useful if you want newly created objects to appear in the centre.

Move to Origin, for example. This will move the cube's origin to the current location of the 3D cursor. This can be helpful if you want an object to be associated with an external point, maybe for pivot operations. Some modifiers and other operations work from an object's origin.