Whenever I attempt to move a component or a group against a face it seems to hover in front or recede behind the face. Is there a way to snap it to the face. Also when I try to lock the direction of movement to one of the axis, as I move the object, at some point in the movement it moves towards or away from the front plane. I guess in general I am having difficulty moving objects cleanly.
Can you upload an example file showing what it is you are trying to do?
File is too big. I keep on deleting items, but can’t get it below the max size.
Okay, manged to get it under. Here is one fraction of a larger project. So I’ve downloaded furniture but keep having difficulty placing things where I want them to go.
example.skp (3.6 MB)
Simply deleting things doesn’t remove components and materials from your file. You have to purge unused stuff, too.
When you grab things to move them, you need to grab them at some point that has a destination. For example, if you want to put the lounge chair on the floor, grab it with the Move tool at the bottom of the leg. then look for the inference message indicating you’re on plane.
I think this has come up in your threads before but you really need to be dealing with correct face orientation before you start applying textures. Otherwise you just have to fix them later and then fix the materials. All those blue faces should be correct so only white front faces are displayed.
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Thanks Dave. Yes I did purge the file also. And I reversed faces and corrected geometry on most of the model, this courtyard paving slipped through. I just tried to move components as you demonstrated with success. I still have trouble rotating items to very small increments. Would this be a tolerance setting or utilizing inferences.
I have taken to heed all the advice I have received so far and have rebuilt much of the model into groups and components and assigned all these to a logical system of layers that I can now hide/unhide with relative ease. My workflow is much better than a few weeks ago…
Are you entering the rotation angle or just trying to eyeball it? You could turn off Angle snapping in Model Info>Units. Turning off Length snapping would also help when you are moving entities.
I am eyeballing it. Also how do you change precison for moving / snapping. Currently I’m at 1/16th and trying to change it.
That’s done in Model Info>Units.
If you always want higher precision, different units, no length snapping, no angle snapping, etc. open a new file, make the changes and use File>Save as template. Make sure you tick the box for Make default.
Note that Precision only affects the displayed dimensions. You can still model things and move them more precisely.
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Okay, did that and moved the whole model around the origin, centering that cylindrical form that I was struggling with last week. I put the precision back to 1/32" as I just neede the 1/64th to get the center point on to the origin axis. Now that I cleaned up all the other geometry, I will go back and rebuild the cylinder and curved stair, etc. around the origin to 120 segments. Thanks.
As I said, the precision setting in Units has nothing to do with how precisely you can draw or move entities. It only affects the display of dimensions. There’s not reason to set Precision to 1/64th in just to move something to the origin. You can move it there just as precisely if the precision was set to 1 foot.
I was looking at someone’s model recently, where using the arrow key to lock blue direction (or holding the shift key), then dragging upwards, the line would snap to an off-blue axis point. And the line remained blue.
If I increased the precision to more than the gap between vertical and the near vertical point, the line might still snap. But it wasn’t blue.
Could it be that sometimes you want higher precision in order to be more certain of being on axis?
The key is to grab the object you want to move in an exact point, in this case the bottom back, and move that point onto the line between the wall and the floor. If you grab the object in an arbitrary point, you are setting the position of that arbitrary point and will not have any real precision.
I’ve gotten better at moving objects, but am still struggling with moving faces. For example when I attempt to create window openings in a circular form, I push down a section of wall, then I use the move tool, highlight a section of horizontal face, select the up key to constrain to the blue axis, I see the note showing the blue axis is constrained, then once i select the option key to copy the face, the blue axis note disappears before I can type in the desired height I want the face to be at. Sometimes it works, more often it doesn’t. I suspect I am not pressing the keys in the right sequence, though I have tried every combination.