CAD Style Precision Movement In Blender 2.83 | CAD Transform 0.0.8 Addon Update

Rhino fusion 360 autocad they are all known for a great snapping and precision movement and who knew that blender was about to join that with this add-on what's up I'm Jonathan and welcome to Maker tales where I'm sharing my maker journey to help you go further in yours so don't forget subscribe and hit that little bell icon to never miss an opportunity to keep making this video is all about a blender add-on called CAD transforms which has just had an update to the 0.08 build and I have to say they've got rid of almost every single gripe that I had and then added some more features on top now blender is point zero zero zero zero one millimeter margin of error I think I can start doing precision modeling with it so let's go over the action plan as there is quite a bit to cover here now I don't want to go super quick but I am going to keep a pretty decent pace through this all so I'm gonna be showing you how to download installing and the overall UI setup as well as how I currently have the UI set up for my build and then from there we will cover the basics along with their little few extras near the end of the basics and then I will cover what I call advanced techniques they're not really advanced techniques they're just techniques of how to use the add-on that might not be inherently obvious and of course if I'm going too quick or too slow feel free to use a youtube little cog down there to be able to speed up or slow this down and I have gone ahead and chaptered up this whole video so you can just jump in and out from section to section so you really only grasp the techniques that you really want to understand like any great blender add-on it begins its journey outside of blender so to download this add-on we need to head over to Stephen Ledger's Gumroad page once here you will see a couple of other great add-ons by him along with CAD transforms for blender now here's where you can download it and you can get it for free but please please PLEASE he's created something incredible here so even one euro goes a long way I personally have given him 25 and I'll probably even give him more just due to the sheer amount of time and effort that this has saved me once downloaded it's just as simple to install head over to edit preferences go into your add-ons and hit the install button go to the file path where you've downloaded it and then hit the checkmark once it's installed while we're here I might as well show you how I currently have this set up along with a couple of points of notice that I should let you know so one of them is this here which is snap to loose geometry this is a setting you might want to turn off if you're working with very big meshes as it can get a little bit laggy if this is turned on as well as default scale 1d all this will make sense later on and here you can see a whole bunch of text settings color settings size settings as well as all the shortcuts that are involved that you can change them all but I feel that currently they're set really well and also this one here of use numpad is navigation that will make sense later on so I'm going to change my text color to a bright pink my font size to 100 this circle radius to 15 my snap widget lines to a 5 my ruler thickness I think six is the one that I go with and this to 3 CAD transforms is a little bit unique in the way that it's activated as you can see on the right hand tool shelf there is nothing here that says CAD transforms apart from this option transform menu here but apart from that there is nothing that's because you have to activate CAD transform by clicking this new little button that you've got here on the left hand side so once you click this button that is CAD transforms activated and you will see that there is a new top toolbar your active tool has the same tool bar and on the right hand side your active tool toolbar workspace settings is also there so there's three different locations to work with CAD transforms now the main way that you're going to be working with cat transforms is with this huge list of shortcuts don't worry they're very easy to remember because v is vertex ears edge shift ears edge Center so on and so forth a couple special mentions is H for x-ray and space bar to clear snapping points and I will show you those in action later on but before we go into the absolute basics I want to show you that this currently does not have a shortcut it might say that it has G R S shortcut however if we go and click our selection box and if we go g this is not going to activate card transforms so me personally i go ahead and right-click and i assign a shortcut and I set alt see if you're uncomfortable assigning a shortcut such as alt C remember there's always the quick menu by right-clicking and add to quick favourites which means that when you press Q you will have your quick menu favourites and you will have card transforms in there if you really wanted to boil down CAD transforms to that very basics it's a snap from and snap to any this is for all the operations move scale and rotate so let's go ahead and let's click already cube here let's hit G to activate move and you can see that it isn't moving like normal blender however if I go over any vertex because we have our vertex selection currently enabled we are now going to select up from snap point so let's select one and now we can move the cube so this is our from and to cus currently we have our vertex selected we can snap to any vertex if we were to hit e that could be an edge from to hit e once again that turns off edge I can turn on F and E so that now we have faces and edges and if I wanted to turn them all off I hit spacebar and now I can select another one so let's go for face centers with shift F and I'm going to go for the face center of this cube here all I'm going to do is left-click and that's it in place now now this works for scale as well so this is very similar to blender default so let's go gaile on the X and we now have our little drag here let's go instead of face centers let's go for vertex and let's go for the vertex right here so now we've just scaled snapped to that vertex over there and that works for rotation as well so let's click this one hit R let's go in the Z and we are now rotating the Z and let's do a snap rotation to this vertex over there so that there is the snap from and snap to any and really do keep in mind that this any is a big emphasis as you can almost combine these to get some really crazy snapping points which I will show you later on something that I find incredible that is default within blender is viewport movement now you might be a little bit confused what I mean by that or what I mean by that is a while in operation so let's select a cube hit G hit an origin point to move our cube and now usually in blender we wouldn't be able to move our view at all however here we can now holding down the middle mouse button we can go and rotate around holding down shift in middle Mouse we can pan around we can still zoom around while we're in the middle of any operation be it a move be it a scale operation right this minute we can go and just say actually you know what I want that to be on an edge Center over here and let's say this rotation here rotating on the Z once again I want to make sure that I'm picking this vertex right here so viewport movement while in operation is incredibly valuable and I cannot believe that this isn't something that is default within blender as you've seen so far CAD transforms is quite like default blender so we've got what I like to call the quick transform options which is when you select an object let's do a scale on this one so we're gonna hit s and we're going for the Y this time it's exactly like default blender except you get these numbers on the right hand side and you can do scale snapping points this is the same with rotation we can do scale snap import on everything like that and with movement unfortunately if you were to just go G and X you have to pick an origin point of where this move location is going to be if you want it to be the origin remember that there is an origin snap right here and so we will go G let's go o to turn that on and now we can do origin movement and there you have it so that is the quick transforms something that I do want to quickly say about this that isn't innately like default blender is there is Auto apply on scale so let's go ahead and with a little scale cube here let's just give it a little bevel so let's go click this bevel let's give it a couple of segments here there we go let's go and look straight at our object so now within default blender if we were to scale and not apply our edge would it go a little bit weird however here within CAD let's go and hit s let's go on the Y once again you will see it will go weird but as soon as I go left click and is auto applied so that's one bit of information to keep in mind that CAD transforms does ought to apply your scale so everything will always stay at one on the scale as you've seen with the move operation we have arbitrary origin and pivot point so let me just show you what I mean by this so let's go ahead and do G from moving and instead of doing a vertex let's say we're wanting to move something from an edge Center so let's turn off the vertex turn off origin let's go shift E and here we have an edge center and we're moving it from here and right there that is our origin point while we're doing that motion now we can do the same for scales let's hit the scale hit s and let's say we're going for the middle of this point to over to the vertex on here and there we have our scale point however what I would say is usually your best weight using a scale is go ahead and hit scale let's go and just vertex we hit an origin point of our scale and now you'll see that we have this axis or the plane setting so I'm going to hit that vertex there and then that's the way it's done just keep in mind that you cannot go into the - when an origin point like this has been set and this also works with rotation so let's go ahead and let's set a rotation from I don't know this skill for the edge center over here so let's go our shift e so we're going from our edge Center to this edge Center and you can see now we're rotating from our edge centers as our pivot point while we're at arbitrary origin points I think I should show you the quickest way to set up both a scale and a rotation one so with our CAD transform on let's go ahead and do a scale movement so let's go to scale I wanted to turn everything off go edge and now with one click I can set my scale you can see that little red circle that red circle is going to be the origin of the scale so then when I click this that's it already set so I don't have to set that custom plane every single time so once again if I went scale and this time I'll say go with this edge over here that's that done that way you can do the same with rotation by hitting our setting this here is going to use that as the origin point it usually it uses X as its default so you can hit + Z to go into Z rotation or Y to go into the Y rotation just showing that once again going our and then we'll set this one here and like that you can set up these custom axes of rotation without having to go every single time setting up from this point to that point a great little thing that comes with CAD transforms is incremental transform so let's go ahead and do a move like we're currently doing and I'm gonna just go ahead and constrain this on the X by hitting X and you can see we have our numbers there on the right hand side if I hold down alt you will see that we jump every point 5 and if I hold down alt and shift we will go every one millimeters as well so that there is incremental transform in the move you have the same four scale so let's set this up here right this minute it is set up in percentage so we can see here it's every five percent and you can also do it by every whole percentage by holding down shift if those weren't selected you will see that we get points to two point one seven and all that and you have the same for rotation so let's go our let's select this little rotation point here let's hold down alt and you'll see it is every five degrees of rotation or you can do it by every whole degree by holding down shift to do along with that incremental transform you can see that we have a unit input and unit definition for all operations so let's go ahead as hit here let's go for our G like we're usually doing let's move from this vertex here let's snap it to the Y this time you can see we've got this millimeters now let's say I want this to go one millimeter well all I have to do is hit one so that's going one millimeter my mouse is now no longer active if I wanted my mouse to be active again I hit escape to cancel that movement and go back to Mouse definition so let's go for a one point five millimeters and you know what I didn't mean to say 1.5 millimeters I wanted to be that let's say 1.5 inches so let's go ahead and set that to inch and there you go I've gone and just added an inch and that's given me 1.5 inches so let's go back let's take that away and let's say I wanted that to be one foot so let's put in ft and that's now one foot away so as you can see definition and unit input you hit enter to say yes and confirm your unit input this also works for scale so let's go and hit S or origin and our axis and let's say we're wanting that to be three and that as you can see right this minute that is three on the percentage don't worry I will show you how to change it this way too you can hit m and then that's going to give us three meters lets go mm and that gives us three millimeters right here so you can do this by just percentage by removing the unit definition or you can put in a unit definition and it will hold that there there's the same with rotation so let's go R and let's put in an input of 15 and if you want it the other way around go - I don't really know if there's any other thing like minutes but I haven't really tested that out because I don't really know how to put in minute degree in to rotation but as you can see you have input right there and hitting enter will confirm your input just before we move on from unit input there's a couple more things to keep in mind one thing is that you can mix unit input with snapping so let's go to a scale hit the edge say this edge here turn off edge snapping and now we just got the vertex snapping and here we can put in - one millimeter so hitting Enter that gives me snapping to this vertex with - one millimeter as you can tell that there was an equation which is another thing you can do so let's go ahead and do a move from this vertex on the X and what I want to show is that you can do equations not only simple equations like 3 minus 1 but you can mix units so let's say 1 centimeter minus 1 millimeter will give us 9 millimeters and you can do this say let's do an example here let's go G move this time on the Y so it goes in the distance and let's say 1 foot - 30 centimeters and there you have it so you can mix it the unit definition and equations all together to get some very interesting results as you've already seen we do have our normal local global and free slapping and grid here now let me just show you a little bit in more detail what I want to show here so I'm going to turn on our origin point I'm gonna hit G I'm gonna select this origin here and so we can go ahead and just hit X and we're gonna be constrained to the X Y for the Y Z for the Z and we can also those shifts dead and that will give us our constraint of our x and y now if we wanted to see the grid that this was currently constrained to we just have to hit G and this will show us our current grid that were constrained to so hitting G cancel that and that works for once again all of them so let's go and give this a really strange scale let's make this a diagonal scale so let's hit s we're going to go from the vertex here to there and I want to see this grid that I'm scaling on so going G and you can see our grid right there and let's just quickly show that we do have our local here so I'm going to go into the normal blender rotation just go for a random rotation degree here and now let's go back into our CAD transforms let's go and hit R and now you can straightaway see our new plane has been set there if we were to hit X you can see our other plane is shown if we have X again you can see our other plane is shown so that there is local global and freeform grids and constraints to go with our unit input and constraints we have something called stacked transforms so let me show you this in action if I were to click a cube hit G for move select its origin point and say Y I can then go Y let's set that to 1.5 and then I can also say actually and on top of that go X let's say minus 3 and then hit enter and there we have it a stacked movement of the Y and X and this applies for everything so let's go for a scale here let's go s for scaling pick our origin and location let's go ahead and let's say on the Y I want this to go two and on the X I want this to go 3 and hit enter and there you have it and as well with rotations so let's go ahead let's just hit R let's pick this axis right here and let's say on the Z of this axis I want to go 45 and on the Y of this I want to go 45 I hit enter and there you have it that is stacked transforms for move scale and rotate something that many CAD users are used to is something called soft constraints so as you've seen it's very easy to go ahead and click it already cube hit G set our origin point and move from there however you can do this to anything it doesn't only have to be the active object so what I mean by soft constraint is I'm wanting to move the distance of this edge here so let's go ahead hit G I'm gonna set this to be my origin point and I can now soft constrain it to the other edge over here and this also works for scale so let's go and hit s say this is our origin and there and we're actually wanting to scale all the way to there as you can see we do get some strange effects with scale but that's because we're scaling the distance from the object as well this works for rotation as well so if we wanted select here hit R we're gonna go and say from this edge to here and we're rotating it to the 45 degree of that cube and there you have it that is soft constraints from move scale and rotate to go along with our soft constraints we have precision soft constraints or what I like to call edge precision soft constraints so let's go ahead and move this cube here by hitting G and let's go and set this for Tech's here and we're wanting to move along this edge here let's say 0.5 of a millimeter now keep in mind that these cubes are only 2 millimeters in size so I'm gonna hit E and now you can see we have this little red circle that gets selected when I go past the center point this is the origin point of what I'm about to put in so now if I put in 0.5 isn't go 0.5 movement from the origin point I hit enter to confirm and there you have it now this is also the same for scale so let's go ahead let's hit our s for scale pick our origin pick our vertex say this edge and I'm wanting to go only let's say to them not to the middle let's go right over here so that's one point five so one point five and there you have it one point five millimeters along the edge of our red cube hit enter and there you have it unfortunately rotation doesn't have this type of snapping and it might be something that gets added but I'm not sure what rotation does still have is the snapping points as always so rotation go ahead here and we've got all our snapping points that we can just set to go with something that's quite interesting and powerful to play about with is the ability to create custom constraints now this is only supported with the Move operation because quite frankly in scale and the rotation operation you are creating custom constraints so right this minute let's just set some random rotation amount on the Y let's go for something like that and I want to show you that there's two ways to create a custom constraint one that is your snapping your from point to the constraint and the other one is you your move point is the constraint itself so let's do first the manual way so let's go and hit G and let's hit our vertex for our move from operation let's hit C for custom constraint and now what we're doing is clicking the origin of constraint and then the that were wanting to go along with and that there is the custom constraint created so now we can click or move from hit X and you'll see that we're now snapped to our constraint that we've just set we can hit G to see this grid of our custom constraint and G once again to hide it and that's how you can create a constraint that moves along that axis of course you can now hit Y to move along the Y of that axis and so on and so forth so let's undo that and let me show you the other way of creating your constraint so we're gonna hit G now we're gonna go straight to hit C and with edge snapping selected you will see that we can create a constraint along this edge again that little red circle that appears on either side that is the origin point so to speak of this constraint so let's hit here and this time instead of saying where the move from is the move from is this edge so it is constrained to this axis and like any other axis that you can set you can say let's go shift Z and now we're moving along the Y and X plane of this custom plane so if we hit G you will see the grid that is being created and that's how you're able to move not just along that plane that you created of the X but sort of perpendicular or parallel to the plane a great little feature is plane intersection and this can work with custom planes for the move now there is no such thing as plane intersection for rotation because quite frankly that is how rotation works like whenever intersects an object that is when is going to go and snap to you can't set a plane intersection along this edge because well that there's nothing really to intersect because that's the way the planes work however let's go ahead and rotate this cube so that it's something along like that so technically speaking this should be a plane intersection around there so to speak so how would this go about well first we'll do it without the custom let's hit G let's set this here as our origin point let's hit Y as you see we have our Y constraint here now to do a plane intersection we have to get something like an edge or a face so let's hit F for face and right there you have it that is now snapped to the intersection point of that face and that is how the intersections work now let's go ahead and do a custom plate now something that I've realized that doesn't quite work is if you went and did this and let's say we're going to go and hit C to create our custom plane let's create our custom plane from here and this direction here so we should have an intersection somewhere around here and now if we go and click this vertex here is our origin point if we hit X we are constrained to that X and because we have face selected you can see that we're snapping to the intersection point here however if you were to now go ahead and do the same as we just did before by hitting Y to go into our local constraint and then did our snapping constraint we have some strange behavior here because what is actually doing is using our custom constraint as the origin point for the Y so wouldn't actually work quite as intended so if you're wanting to use the global axis as the constraint so to speak don't bother creating a custom constraint because that would just throw things off so there you go that is some custom constraints right there and intersection points let's just undo that and show you that with the scale now so let's go and hit s let's go from here to there and now we're scaling so we know that we can just work basically snapping into points but if we go ahead here and looks like we're snapping right to where this would be but as you can see the constraint is just a hundred and five degrees from our degree sorry 105 percentage is where the intersection point of that face is for this scale so there it is that is planes of intersection for scale and movement we also have perpendicular snapping so just to make a good demonstration let's just go ahead and rotate this at some random degree this way and rotate this some random degree that way and let's select our red cube let's go and G to move select our vertex here and if you hit P you will see that up on the top left perpendicular has being clicked I'm going to turn off V for vertex so we only have perpendicular so this will now whenever I go over an edge is going to move perpendicular to of that location as you can see some lines also get drawn out and this is how we do perpendicular movement with movement now I will go ahead and show you this with the scale as well so let's hit our blue cube here hit scale let's go and set it up on the vertex turn off our perpendicular from here to there turn on perpendicular back on turn off our vertex and now you can see with the perpendicular snapping to different edges and let's also do that for rotation very quickly so let's go here go R and turn off our perpendicular vertex turn on our rotation where we're wanting to go and go P for perpendicular and turn off our vertex and you will see our perpendicular snapping so that we're a perpendicular to different angles that are set very quickly we can just say oh go perpendicular to that edge or this random edge here and that there you will see that we've now set a perpendicular to that edge right there so that's perpendicular snapping just before we move on from perpendicular snapping I also want to show you that you can constrain this perpendicular snapping to an axis so this could be a custom plane as well so let me just go ahead let's hit G let's move from a vertex this vertex constrain it to the Y and you'll see that we have our constraint going let's hit P for our perpendicular so right this minute we're going perpendicular to this edge and as you see because we are constrained to the Y it's staying down there however if I turned off that when I would be perpendicular to it I would be up to that level perpendicular speaking or if I hit Y you will see that it will constrain it down to the ground to go with intersections and perpendicular we also have a parallel snapping so to show this off I'm going to set a couple of random rotations here so let me just go ahead and do that now so we've got this here let's go for that there and let's put this one that way so let's start first with our move operation so if we go G we select our vertex for wanting to move if we hit P we've got our perpendicular now if we hit P again we have parallel so now it will move parallel to our edges now what parallel really does is if we're wanting to move parallel to this edge you now put in I don't know four millimeters and that it sit moved parallel to that edge using that from point four millimeters now when it comes to scale parallels a little bit different in the sense that what it's really doing is just taking in the size so to speak so if I go and put in parallel and sort of being parallel it takes in this dimension here as an input for what the scale size should be so because these are all the same size you can't really tell so just let's go and set this one to a nice long length and now let's say if we're using the scale we're going along this edge and we want these two to be the same length well with parallel it picks in the same scale length right there but one of the ones that I find is a most useful as rotation so let's go with the rotation here let's set our axis up and now when we go P and P for parallel we can tell it to go parallel to this edge you'll parallel to that edge to any edge we want to pick it's a really quick and simple way to set a rotation parallel to one another and just before we go into the extras of this add-on I need to say that everything I've just shown you is also edit mode compatible so if we go ahead and let's select our cubes here go into edit mode you can see that we can go and your vertex select let's select I don't know these two vertices here turn on our CAD because you have to return it on remember that the shortcut will have to be reassigned as well and now let's turn off our I still hit G to do our movement let's turn off our parallel let's go vertex snapping and let's say I'm wanting to snap this to the face center of that alright so shift F and now we're snapping to the face Center this is just a very quick thing to show you but it is completely doable and possible everything that I've just shown you in all those examples is possible in edit mode with all your vertices edges and faces do keep in mind the following though if an object is not within edit mode it's not going to be doing this snap operation so to speak so if I go ahead here I go G and I tell it to move here to that face Center it's not going to move that face Center or any vertex as this other cube that I'm trying to snap to is not in edit mode however if I were to bring them both into edit mode you will see that I will then be able to snap to it also keep in mind the following which is if we go ahead and delete whoops delete a whole bunch of vertices here so let's go into our selection select all this here and actually not that much let's go for these there that this here is also possible in this new update being able to move around edges and single vertices using the add-on just be aware that it does use a lot of computing power to do this so let's just show this in action so with that selected let me make sure that I hit G to select the vertex and you can see that I can now snap this long now if you have a giant mesh that you're working with in edit mode in preferences right here you have snap to loose geometry you might want to turn this off if you have a good hundred thousand three million or eight million vertices just floating about to get rid of as it will bring your computer to a crawl due to how intensive this is to find these floating loose geometry vertices and edges now we're going to move on to some of the extras things that are also compatible with this add-on along with a couple of hidden little features that that might not be so obvious so to start off with in the extras we have 1d 2d and 3d scaling and like I mentioned before there is no negative transform in scaling so let's go ahead hit our red cube hit s our origin point and our axis and we have our 1d scaling here if I hit tab we now have 2d scaling and if I hit tab again we have 3d scaling now of course I can always just say I want this to be 5 millimeters and there we go we have now snapped in 3-dimensional 5 millimeters to do scaling up this is extremely useful if you're trying to scale up DXF soar vector files that we've imported because now when you hit enter remember that scaling gets automatically applied in object mode so you don't even have to worry about that as I mentioned right at the start I was going to show you what this absolute scale is so this minute when we go ahead and do our scaling you can see that by default on the alt is going to snap to the percentage scaling so what is absolute scaling absolute scaling here on the option we're going to turn it on absolute scaling and what it's going to do is instead of snapping to the percentage it's going to snap to the distance CAD transforms is also compatible with only parents so if we were to select these two to be the parent here we now have this as our parent and if we go into our options transforms this is a blender default but that add-on is compatible with it so let's go parents only select our parent here hit G and let's do our movements and as you can see this is parent only movement if we had parents only off and we then did G you would see that this would move the children as well along with only parent is also compatible with only location to some really interesting effects so if we were to go here imagine you can have all your snapping controls with working only with the location one of the best examples of this is with rotation so I'm gonna hit R for rotation I'm gonna set the rotation to this here and you can see now some really interesting results with only location turned on and lastly to go with only locations and only parent is only origin so let's turn on only origin and right here you can see that we can now move our origin point using our current new little program so let's turn on O for origin snapping and now we have our origin so we can set this anywhere we'll want one of my favorite ones is shift F for face centers so you can set it to the face center of the base and there you have it keep in mind this doesn't have to be done only with origin so that can be done turned off is that you can now do something very interesting in edit mode so we can go into edit mode let's select this object here and let's say we wanted to move things to our origin point by slapping too it we can select all our edges here hit G that's going from that vertex to that origin point there or if we wanted to we can go G and instead we're going from our face center to our origin point as well so you can go ahead and set your origin point inside of edit mode using CAD transforms and while we're pointing out things that are also compatible with CAD transforms Auto merge vertices is also compatible let's go ahead hit tab into edit mode select some vertices right here make sure that our Auto merge is turned on and now when we go ahead and do our movement so let's go here to there you can see now if I go and do G and move we have now gone an auto merge something to keep in mind is that CAD transforms does not support currently the mirror option one of the things that might not be inherently obvious of CAD transforms is that it has a curved support so as you see we have our curves right here let's turn our CAD transforms hit G we can snap to an a vertex and then snap it to a Center and this is also available with in edit mode itself so let's go into edit mode that's going to top view let's select one of our vertices here let's hit G snap to there and go to the middle point here and there you have it so curve support with in edit mode and in object mode keep in mind that this is one of the ones that I've haven't used that much so if there are some hidden little things that I don't know this would probably be the one something to keep in mind is the actual custom adaptive grid so what I mean by that is our custom plane so if I go ahead and I hit G and we're gonna go and snap to our top vertex here and then we're going to constrain it off the X will have here so let's hit G for our plane as we get closer you'll see that there's more detail to our grid so it's an adaptive grid however in perspective we have a bit of an a problem there however if we go into the top view and then we start scaling down you will see that it gets more and more more and more detailed so that is the custom adaptive grid lastly just before we go into some advanced use cases we have something called a smart slash memory move or averaging many CAD users are probably used to this but let's go ahead and show you what I mean if we hit G and we hit this vertex here we are now moving around here now let's say I wanted to find the exact middle distance between these two points what I can do is go over this vertex hit a to bring that point into memory go over to our next point and there you go that is our average between those two points I hit click to confirm it and there you have it now I can also do this by a third by going G selecting our vertex going a once and now a twice and there we have it one third has been moved along that distance and just a small reminder that all of this is completely possible in edit mode as well so if we wanted to vertex select selected this vertex here go G so we have this here we can actually go a to put that point into memory and then cus were over here now when we click we're now in the average between those two points so just keep in mind that I am currently learning this out on just as much as you but I have found a couple of advanced use cases so to speak that I think would be very interesting to share with you so without any further ado let's go into these little advanced techniques first one is stacked constraints now there are many different stacking options here many of which I haven't even played around with but I'm sure there are even more so let's go ahead and show you an example so this is a normal to a face center so I'm going to go select this cube here hit G and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go for the face center of this base okay brilliant so now I'm going I can snap to the face centers of these and now if I hit n for normal what I can do go onto the face Center hit one to go up one millimeter from the face center of that normal that I just snapped to something I would like you to keep in mind is how custom constraints are set up and it's different vertices normals and edges and in scale movement rotations so let's go ahead select our cube here hit G for moving and now we know that we can click our origin point let's hit C to set up a custom constraint and what we can do is click where this constraint is now we can go shift Z and constrain our Z to the global z-axis right here so now we're only moving our x and y so that is one thing to keep in mind that you can do with the move constraint custom creation now with scale custom constraint as you know there isn't such thing but as you've seen I just want to make sure that you understand where we're hitting s and setting this up right now we're setting up a custom constraint right now so and so it's best to set up an origin point go along an edge and that is a custom constraint set up the same with rotation which is our we can now set up our custom constraint we can also go shift Z here and constrain our Z upwards and do our rotation in some weird other direction so that there is with vertices and with normals it's slightly different because if we were to go ahead and hit G now for moving making sure that our normal is turned on we now have straight away if I go to hit C for a custom constraint it's going to be using our normal as our z axis so that means it already has an idea what our axis that we're setting for our custom constraints is going to be so I'm going to go and select face center here and now when I click that is our custom constraint created using our normal as our Z so I will do that once again if I G and our normal is set and I hit C it's going to use our normal as our constraint for the Z of our custom constraint this is the same for edges and we'll use the edge as our Z this is also applies within scale and rotation lastly let's go about doing face to face with normals now I've shown you something like this before but I was very specific in the way that I showed you it so what I wanted to do right this minute is just quickly create a Suzanne right here because this is something that's going to be best shown with basically a mesh that isn't so easy to be seen so we have our mesh right here Suzanne so let's go ahead and go with G for the moving of Suzanne Suzanne from her origin point so let's turn off versed's from our origin point perfect now I'm going to go face centers and normals turnoff origin point and you can see how Suzanne is snapping to these face centers now something that's quite interesting is that you can constrain this itself so if we go to this face normal here we can go shift Z or shift X to change the constraining axis of the normal so right this one if we go shift Y you can see that we're constrained inwards that's because currently we're using the normal as our custom constraint so let's go and fix this so let's undo this movement here of Suzanne and let's set up a custom constraint while we're setting up Suzanne so let's go ahead and hit G let's go hit C for custom constraint now let's hit our over origin point so we're going from the origin point so now we're going to set up this custom constraint let's go to the vertex there in the center so let's go V and let's snap to that vertex so a custom constraint has been set and now we'll turn off that go from the origin point once again it's now we're moving from the origin point turn off the origin point go to face centers and normals and now you can see that when we go shift Z or shift X were now snapping with her facing outwards this is because we set a custom constraint for her local and this is very powerful as you can tell you can really slap to almost anything here if I had an ico sphere I could snap to that ico sphere to the normal and it's incredibly powerful what you can use mixing custom constraints face to face and normals and this is what I mean by the stat constraints that I currently I haven't even have the time to really go about and really test this out so that there is one of the custom constraints that I thought I would share with you of course creating a custom constraint for something like Suzanne that all you're really wanting to do is have her face the other way of what her local axis is already set up to which you'll see if we go into this move here and select Suzanne you will see that her Y is facing in this direction and this is why we're facing inwards when we don't set up a custom constraint there is a little workaround though there's a new little hidden little thing which is i for inversion so let's go ahead and do what we've just done we can hit G for the moving we're gonna move on her origin let's select face centers and normals and then let's have Suzanne facing inside and you see currently she is facing inside because we've just snapped this direction however if we now hit I we've now just flipped that axis so now for without having to create any other custom constraints we have twice the amount of basically constraints from a local by hitting I to be able to flip any axis that we were snapping through last time so let's go shift X and you can hit I and or flipping our local axis in that way and there you have it that there is CAD transforms the one add-on that's made blender can politely possible for me to do precision modeling I would love to hear what you think of it yourself and if you think blender is now worth doing some type of precision modeling yes it's missing many things but for something that's completely free and open-source I think it's something that might be viable a huge thank you to my patrons you guys are awesome and I love your support and if you like the content I'm making here I love it if you consider supporting me to remember that I have a small precision blender course going right this minute right here completely free on YouTube if you're only interested in learning blender for precision modeling I'm teaching what I know as I go along to the best of my ability to show you how I use blender for precision modeling thanks for watching keep making and let the quest continue

Channel: Maker Tales

Views: 34,604

Keywords: blender, blender 2.83, blender 2.8, blender tool tutorial, blender cad, blender architecture, blender cad modeling, blender architecture add on, blender cad transform add-on, blender cad transformation, beginner, cad, 2.83, precision drawing tools, hard surface modeling, how to, tutorial, rhino3d, technical drawing, accurate, modelling, precise, bleder, mm accurate in blender, Movement, Snap to, vertices edges and faces, Normals, Edge center, Snaping, move, transform, technical modeling

Id: TWEoZghkalc

Length: 51min 55sec (3115 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020