Snapping
Snapping makes things line up without you nudging them into place. There are two kinds, and they work together: a grid that quantises how far a drag moves, and element snapping that lands the object on real geometry that is already in the scene.
Everything here is a local preference — your snapping setup is yours, and your peers see only the result of your drags.
Where it lives
Right-click the viewport ▸ Snapping. The parent row shows your current setup at a glance (0.25 · 15° · 0.1 · V F), so you can read it without opening the menu. Custom step values live in Configure Scene ▸ Snapping, one click away at the bottom of the same submenu.
Grid snapping
| Setting | Snaps |
|---|---|
| Position | movement to a step — 0.1, 0.25, 0.5, 1, or your own |
| Rotation | turning to 5°, 15°, 45°, 90°, or your own |
| Scale | scaling to 0.05, 0.1, 0.25, or your own |
Enable / Disable snapping at the top of the submenu is the master switch for these three.
Snap to surface
Surface ▸ Snap to surface drops a dragged object onto whatever is underneath it — the quickest way to keep furniture on the floor and props on tables.
Element snapping
Switch on any of the Elements targets and, while you drag with the gizmo, the app looks for a matching feature near the cursor. When one is in range it lights up, and releasing lands your object exactly on it — overriding the grid step for that drag, because you asked for that point specifically.
| Target | Lands on |
|---|---|
| Vertex | a corner of the mesh under the cursor |
| Edge | the nearest point along an edge |
| Face | the centre of a face |
| Surface | the exact point the cursor is over — a continuous slide across the surface rather than a discrete point |
| Object | another object's origin, its bounding-box centre, or the centre of one of its six sides |
You can have several on at once; the closest candidate to the cursor wins. The search radius is in screen pixels, so it behaves the same however far you have zoomed.
Vertex + Surface is a good default pair
Surface gives you a smooth slide over a shape; Vertex bites onto its corners when you get close to one. Together they feel like the object is magnetic where it matters.
Align to normal
With Align to normal on, snapping to a face or a surface also turns the object onto that surface — drop a picture onto a slanted wall and it takes the wall's angle instead of staying upright.
Pick your snap origin
By default an object snaps by its own origin. Often that is the wrong point: you want this corner of the shelf to meet that corner of the wall.
With exactly one object selected, choose Pick snap origin, then click a point on it. That point becomes the anchor for your drags — snapping now moves it onto the target. The anchor is temporary and purely local: it is not part of the object, it is never replicated or saved, and it does not touch the object's real origin.
Inside mesh edit
Element snapping applies to the mesh tools' gizmo drags too, so a vertex can be dropped precisely onto another vertex — which is what you want when closing a seam by hand.
In VR
VR has its own snap modes for grabbed objects (grid, surface, free) on the Edit ring — see the VR guide. Those are separate controls and switching them never disturbs your desktop element-snapping setup.