Oh SNAP!!!

[Alaskan_Son]

Ever have trouble losing the Extension Snaps/Snap Anchors that you really need and instead you keep picking up on others that you don't want?  Here are a few power tips to help highlight some of Chief's handy dandy little tools that I think probably get overlooked or forgotten by the vast majority of us...'specially those of us what don't read the 'structions...

 

We have a lot of special snap capabilities to control how snaps behave, but I specifically felt like offering some unsolicited pointers on-the-house regarding 4 of them:

1. Edit>Preferences>Edit>Snap Properties>Options>Objects in History - This number controls how many Extension Line Anchors Chief will remember at a time.  By default I believe this is set to 2 but it can be set to anything between 1 and 20.  If you up the number to 20 you will probably never lose the Anchor you really want but you'll also have a whole bunch more of those extension snaps jumping out on you, so picking up on the one(s) you want might take a little extra effort.
2. The "S" key - Holding down the "S" key temporarily overrides Object Snaps meaning you can stop Chief from setting any new Anchors while mousing around your plan.  For example, you can set an Anchor at Point A, hold down the "S" key, drag your pointer through your minefield of potential anchors, release the "S" key, and then set an Anchor at Point B...and hold down the "S" key again if necessary while you wade back through the minefield again in order to find the intersection of those 2 Extension Snaps.
3. The "1" key - Pressing 1 clears your entire Snap Anchor history (all 1-20 of them).  We can use this to quickly clear the slate and start fresh anytime we mess up.
4. The Control key - Okay this one seems a bit obvious but I think its easy to overlook some things about this one as well.  The Control Key overrides all Snap behaviors including Bumping/Pushing, Angle Snaps, and Orthogonal Movement.  I think most of us use this pretty often, but it can be overlooked as a handy way to allow a temporary override of these 3 items in particular.  Holding down the Control key can allow us to drag an object closer to where we want it before releasing the Control key and then taking advantage of Snaps again.

 

 

 

[AvoyeDesign]

I have my s key bound to another tool via hotkeys.  Do you know what tool or function the s key is controlling so that I can bind it to another hotkey?

[Alaskan_Son]

On 3/9/2021 at 8:31 AM, AvoyeDesign said:

I have my s key bound to another tool via hotkeys.  Do you know what tool or function the s key is controlling so that I can bind it to another hotkey?

No.  I’m sorry, I don’t.  Chief has a small handful of special functions that aren’t connected to any specific tool. Once you use that hot key for something else, I think you simply lose the capability in some cases.