Temporary Snapping

As described in Chapter 2, "A Tour of Maya," you often need Maya to help you place things precisely, especially when you're creating or editing mechanical or man-made objects. For example, if you're editing the pivot point of a door, you want the pivot to be exactly on the door's corner edge. Maya's snaps pull you toward a grid point, object edge, or object point when needed. Instead of enabling snapping permanently, you can temporarily engage the type of snap you want as you move scene elements around. The hotkeys for snapping are x (grid), c (curves), and v (points).

To use temporary snapping, you need to already be in Move mode and have something selected. If you hold down the x key, you'll see the square at the center of the transform icon become a circle. If you try to move the selected item, you find that it snaps to the grid. Curve and point snapping are similar, but you need to specify the curve or point of a deselected object. To do this, you hold down the snap-to key (c or v) and then MMB-click on the edge or point of the target object. Further movement of the object is now constrained to the curve or point.