Building Skills 002- Snaps

THIS LESSON IS BEING WRITTEN NOW, PLEASE DO NOT READ - Domswolf

Hello everyone! Welcome to the second lesson of Building Skills and the first lesson of this mini-class called Tips and Tricks! This mini-class will involve me sharing my personal feelings and techniques about building. Electiz will do some of these as well. It's sort of like a recommendation class but you can choose to do whatever you want. These are just skills many builders and I share

Today we will talk about snaps. I mentioned these in the first lessons of the beginner class. Snaps are like the points where a brick will clamp itself. For example: On the default 1/5th stud snap, you can move and scale bricks 1/5th of a stud per notch. There is also 1 stud, that moves them by 1 stud, and Off, where they will move by 1/100th of a stud.

The question is: What snap do I use in particular situations?

So I will now share how I use all three of these snaps (if you forgot, the snaps can be changed in your Home tab next to the rotation tool)

1 stud: The only times I will ever use 1 stud snaps are when I am working with gigantic bricks. One example is my work with PurpleDev Studios' game Le Ship.

I work on this game by both testing and building the islands. When building the islands, I scale grass along a very wide area. Sometimes they are even so long, from a distance it is hard to get it right in the spot you need at 1/5th stud. Because of how far away the green dot is in this photo, when you try to move it just a few pixels across your screen, you can make it go at least a few studs.

Two things can happen here. Either we can slowly travel all the way to the green scale dot to get it exact (which depending on what you are building, could result in you going back and forth trying to get it just right) or we can use the 1 stud snap to worry no more about having a gap of a really small amount.

1/5th stud: This is the default snap and the one you should use most often. This allows you to make small movements and get things in the right place easily. Not much to be said here. But things get a little bit complicated when we get to the Off snap.

Off: This one can be a problem because it can be hard to get bricks exactly where you want, but it is very good for two main techniques.

One of which is the 1/10th stud offset. I have talked about this before: when you rotate a brick and it ends up 1/10th of a stud too close of too far on two axis. I mentioned you can use the position properties to fix this but it becomes a problem when this glitch occurs with models. This may have happened to you before. What you do is get as close as you can to the movement arrow (while still having the ability to click on it without clicking whatever is behind it) and you very slowly move your cursor across the axis.

Count up to 10 notches, this is how far 1/10th of a stud is. Do this on whatever axis you need to do.

The second time I use this the most is making hanging ceiling wires and pipes in sci fi games. I have done this in my showcase Svecenia.

This may seem easy to do with a cylinder, but that would only make a square "rope". In this, I want cylindrical pipes. I will use the Off snap to get the cylinder in just the right place. With 1/5th stud it can look broken and with 1 stud, it is just a disaster...

Rotation: What you may be wondering is what to do for the rotation. Personally I don't use either of these for rotations. I like to use the new Transform Tool. The off tool has no snap at all on rotation but it technically does on position. You can change the position of a brick by a factor of 1/1000th of a stud! same with rotation.

Now of course there are plugins like qCmdUtl and Oozledraw Toolbar. I personally like to leave plugins out of the picture and do everything customly. You all do whatever you want.

-Domswolf

Exercises

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Make some pipes/ropes that curve

Practice fixing 1/10th stud offset