In this video tutorial we will snap an object to the face normal of another object. This makes aligning different objects perfectly quite easy!
Written version:
Here we have a simple 3d model of the earth. We also have a couple of different buildings which we want to start placing around the sphere.
If we try to place them manually, we need to rotate them from several directions and it’s still quite hard to get the angle just right. So let’s undo that and consider a different approach.
Luckily we can use the snap function to replace some of this manual labor. We will be snapping to the direction of the face normals. You can see those normals if you go to edit mode and click on the display face normals button.
To turn on the snap function, we click on the magnet symbol under our 3d view. Let’s choose “face” as the snap element. We’ll specify “active” as the snap target, which will simply snap the active object to the target. Let’s also turn the “align rotation” feature on so that not only will our buildings snap their location to the faces but they will also align their rotation to them.
Now we can start duplicating our buildings and when we move them over the sphere, they will always snap into the right angle as long as you are touching the sphere with the circular snap indicator.
This makes the placement of the buildings very easy!
Thanks for watching and see you next time on OneMinuteVideoTutorials.com!