Snap, Targeting, Rigging, Connections

In scenario, we have a lot of different item types. And in the real world, these items don't just exist in a vacuum. They have relationships with each other. Great example is that actors often look at each other. Let's make another actor here. And they need to have this relationship. The same is true for cameras and fixtures. Fixtures are often made to target certain actors. Cameras also target actors. And now whenever you move these, they follow each other. This is called targeting. You see everything is following what it's supposed to be looking at.

Now the way that you do this is you use snap. So snap can be on or off. You can use the button down here to turn it on or off. You can also use the N key, which I'm doing now. And if you just want to have it on temporarily, um, you can hold shift. So right now I'll have this off. But if I move this around, you can see that now it is free moving and it's not targeting anything. But if I hold the shift key, then I get that targeting behavior back. If I release it, it goes away. So that's how you turn it on and off. But let's look at some examples of what it actually does. So, not only do these objects like to have relationships with one another, they also like to line up with one another.

So, with snap on, you can see that as I move any item around, it's going to find other items around it to align with. So, that's how you line those up. And another thing that they do is it allows it to connect to other objects. Like let's say I have some truss here that I want to rig this on. With snap on, first of all, with snap off, I can move this around it. It's not going to interact with it at all. But if I turn snap on, then you can see that it's going to be able to rig to that pipe. It'll rig to either rail or to the center just for neatness. But once it's on there, if I select that pipe, it's going to go anywhere that that pipe goes. This truss, if I rotate it, it's going to do that. And you can see that it's still maintaining its targeting relationship.

Another great example of this is Dolly Track. And it's a great example of being able to rig multiple things together at once. So here I take a camera and I put it on the dolly track. I can put it right there. And now it's going to move wherever I move. And if I decide I want to put it on this track itself, let's go ahead and get rid of that. then I'm going to be able to move it all along that track and everything is going to move together. Now that track moves that way. And once again, if I have a relationship between one of these rigged items and something else, let's say it's going to be for that, then that will always maintain what that relationship is supposed to be.

Another example uh of connections that could be made are cables and boxes. So you can connect electrical cable to a box and it'll allow you to make that connection because snap is on. Then another great example here is arrows. So if I happen to uh move from here then the arrow itself needs to be able to connect and if it has snap on then it can't snap off. That arrow can move freely. Nothing gets in the way.

There are some items that have a little more complex rigging logic. So, what you saw over here with everything that we did with individual points, with uh items that have a distinct center, um they're just aligning their center with other things. But with something like a frame, uh it's variable size and uh it does have a center obviously, but it also has a lot of different places where you might rig it in the real world. Let's take a condor bucket for example. Um if you're building a fly swatter, it needs to be out over the edge. So instead of only having it being able to rig to the center, items like this can actually detect when you're rigging them at an edge or at a corner as well as at the center. So as long as it's saying rig to item there, I'm going to go ahead and drop it. And now you'll be able to see that if I select that condor and move it around, that's going to follow.

So there are a lot of other little rigging behaviors that you'll find. The same is true for uh doors going onto a wall. Windows the same way. Uh they'll actually rotate to match it because they have to uh but you have the freedom of rotation with other items. So that is how snap works. That's how that affects uh your ability to create relationships between items.