Surface Snapping Orientation to Normal
Hello Blenderers!
Recently i faced a situation concerning Surface Snapping. Few weeks ago, i was at my work, and my co worked who is working on 3DS asked me how snapping was working within Blender. I made a small demo, and he was just amazed about how it was easy to snap an object to a surface and having a good orientation. He was facing issue, that in 3DS, he couldn't align the object correctly with the target face if that one was smoothed, even if the geometry was totally flat. In fact, 3DS takes smoothing in consideration while snap-aligning.
But today, i was modeling R2D2 and while i tried to align MeshMachine plugs i made, i couldn't align the plug to the cylinder easily. The cylinder beeing 64 vertices, it meant that there was only 64 orientation possible. In that particular case, it would have been nice to have an option to take the smoothing of the surface into consideration to have a better surface snapping without the need to put an extra cylinder with 256 faces to have intermediary orientation.
TLDR: Adding and option to take surface smoothing into consideration for surface snapping would be nice
1 Comment
I believe that using the Shrinkwrap modifier with "target normal project" will do this, but this isn't available in the modal snapping.
What I usually do when retopologizing is -- have a Shrinkwrap vertex group and a Shrinkwrap modifier that is configured the way I want, but disabled. When I need to use it, I assign some vertices to the group and then duplicate & apply the modifier. Then I remove the snapped verts from the group. Not quite as good as having it work live, but it has a few advantages, too - like the ability to use weight paint tools to adjust the snap for example.