Guest Workshop: Snap to Grid for Beginners

[WhoGuru]

Snap to Grid for Beginners:

Snap to Grid is easily the most useful feature of the CS you'll ever use whether building house, city or dungeon interiors. It will help you avoid things like gaps in floors, walls and ceilings as well as areas of overlap that flash when in game, taunting you. Using Snap to Grid you will also notice your building goes much faster and with fewer headaches gained trying to align tileset pieces 'just so'.

First, find the Snap to Grid button on the Tool bar in the CS. Pictured here:

Click the button to turn Snap to Grid on. It should look like this:

Now, place the first tileset piece of your interior. This is the building block for every other piece you will place and a second of your time now will save you hours of headaches later. Double click on the piece to open it's Reference window. You will be changing the position under 3D Data. In each of the six categories, change the numbers to 0 (zero). As here:

From this piece you'll build everything else. Each piece you place after this will have a Z Rotation of:

-0, -90, -180, 180, 90 or 0

This makes it blissfully easy to align each successive piece as you build and avoid the pitfalls of badly aligned sections, open walls, floors, ceilings and overlap., all the hallmarks of untrained or shoddy modding. Once you get the hang of this, it goes very quickly.

This does not mean you'll never have to align anything by hand again of course. There are simply some pieces that need to be nudged, the Fort tile set is famous for them. You will find you spend much less time attempting to correct errors during building while using Snap to Grid.

Enjoy!

[DaMage]

I hope Red doesnt mind me chucking in a few things here.

If you want to change the value for your snap to grid, so the jump is more or less, you can change it in the preference window. To open it, go to the file bar up the top and go file -> Preferences. This should open up the following window:

The two boxes circled are the one for snap to grid and snap to rotation. The defaults are 64 (grid) and 45 (rotation), but I personally prefer using 32 or 16 for my grid (16 is sort of a must for fort pieces, but otherwise 32 is normally good enough) and 45 degree turns. If you are just building a layout, then a rotation snap to of 90 is just fine and can save a little bit of time.

Suggested grid value guidelines. Us numbers that are multiple of 2, eg:

2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 ...

As most layout pieces are built for these numbers. If something isn't fitting together right,just drop down a value and try again, i have had to go as low as 4 at times to get things to fit with snap to grid.

Suggested rotation value guidelines. Remember degrees in school? You want parts of 90 to make most of your stuff. eg:

15, 45, 90, 180 ...

Most of the time you will only ever need 45, if you want something else you might as well just do it by hand or by a value you. I have never had to change my rotation value.

One final tip: The fort doors are poorly aligned, whenever you place one, you will then have to move it up 2 on the z-axis to make it fix the frame.

[grond]

Pink? Really? Nevertheless, a great little tut, that's very very important.

[WhoGuru]

Terrific additions Mage!! Thanks very much for those! Very useful indeed.

[Arthmoor]

Sage advice. Snap to grid lets you get down to the cool details of your locations much faster. And it works just as nicely outside on the landscape too.

My personal preference for the snap to grid value is 1. I tend to be a precision nut and can't stand it when pieces jump around in large movements. I can't honestly say I've ever made use of snap to angle though. Since nearly everything I do is on 45-90 degree angles anyway it's just been easiest to remember my 45/90/135/180 angles instead and change those via the reference edit screen.

[StarX]

It's pretty much the most essential tool when building dugeons, houses and other architecture. I always tend to select my first piece in the renderwindow as my Snap Reference and sometimes change it later on when using combinations of tilesets. Not sure if that's of any use, but it works great for me.

[Zaldir]

Great little tutorial Red!

Thank you very much.

[WhoGuru]

Here's another useful follow up to using Snap to Grid.

The Cave Tileset

Have you ever wondered why there are four versions of most every floor, wall, hall and corner piece in the Cave tileset? There IS a reason. The Textures on that tile set line up a specific way. Turning a cave piece to fit screws up those textures.

Here you can see an example of this in the CS:

Now, you see the four versions of the wall piece below? If I want to add a wall to the top of my floor there, I need to choose the correct version OF that wall. When building with the Cave set, you NEVER want to "turn" pieces to make them fit. Take the extra few seconds to find the piece meant to go there.

Your caves will look more complete and professional if you're not goofing the textures all over the place by needlessly turning pieces to fit rather than exercising a little patience and finding the correct piece.

This lesson courtesy of Arthmoor who taught me this while I was building for RST and hadn't payed attention to WHY there were four of each.

[DaMage]

I had always wondered....

I better fix my caves up now...

[Rowan]

A word of advice: when working in the same cell, try not to change your snap to grid value, especially if you have to move a lot of pieces at once. You might run into the issue of the next piece you add not fitting previously added pieces (even though you are using grid snap). If this happens you can try clicking the button that says "select snap reference" and then select the piece you are trying to connect to. Most of the time this works, but I've noticed that sometimes all the pieces can become "stuck" and it's impossible to get any more pieces to line up. This can be a real pain, but you then have to nudge every single existing piece, separately, back to the current grid. I wonder if anyone else has experienced this phenomenon and knows a sure fire way to avoid it?

This is one reason to save cluttering until you are sure that the main tileset pieces are where they will stay. Because if the tileset pieces become "stuck" all the clutter will be out of place after you do the nudging.

Also, does anyone know if the "Use World" checkbox does anything?

Edited December 9, 2009 by InsanitySorrow
NO using symbols to bypass word censor

[Rowan]

Another question: Is there a hotkey to toggle gridsnap? I see the little grid button on the toolbar - that's fairly quick, but a hotkey would be quicker...

[Rowan]

Hmm, so I've run into a problem with gridsnap. Before I knew that I was supposed to set the first piece the 0,0,0 point, I put together almost a whole interior with clutter items. But now I'm having a lot of trouble getting the pieces to line up. Sometimes I have to nudge every piece individually, to fit a new piece. It can be incredibly tedious - but I'm beginning to think that I need to set one piece to the zero point and just re-align everything to that piece. What do the experts recommend?

[DarkRider]

Yes, you need to set one piece at one end to 0 point, then adjust the others to it.

[Rowan]

what other consequences will there be if I don't (Besides the pieces not aligning correctly sometimes - I can usually fix it though)? I'm just thinking that maybe I could just leave this cell how it is, since there are 504 objects that I will have to individually re-position, and start the next cell correctly.

[DarkRider]

If the pieces don't align, they cause physical seams to appear in game, which are immersion breaking and usually result in complaints from BETA testers and players. If you want to leave it and take your chances that's up to you. Guess what you have to decide is what level of quality are you going to hold yourself to? For me leaving a cell misaligned because it's a bit of work to fix would be unacceptable, but that's up to you.

When I first rebuilt Sancre Tor's interior, I did the entire thing without knowing how to use snap to grid. I went back through later and aligned the whole thing to grid and the result is MUCH better. I understand that going back now seems time consuming, but it really does go fast if you commit to it, and you'll be much more satsified with your work when you know it's done right.

[Rowan]

That true... but I don't actually notice any seams in-game. I can usually get the pieces to snap together using "select snapping reference in render window" The problem is that periodically, the pieces won't align when I try to move a bunch of pieces at once. It's pretty weird.

But just to avoid that, it might be worth it to set the whole thing to the zero point.

Looks like my dread was unnecessary. I moved one piece to the zero point and then selected everything else and snapped it to that piece, and it actually lined up. Was not expecting that. We'll see what happens now!

[daisytx]

Thank you sooo much for these instructions!! Helping me a lot with my CS Basics Basement!

Daisy

[Deran9ed]

Cheers for this.

Helped me rebuild my CS basics basement after testing it in game and finding alot of overlap.

~ Deran9ed.

[UmTheMuse]

Wow, the perfect answer when I was getting frustrated I knew from the CS basics tutorial that I needed to set the first piece to 0, 0, 0, but I didn't realize that the angle mattered too. I was getting really frustrated, adjusting each section of fence by hand so that the angles more or less matched up.

Then I finished reading thruogh the lesson and found this gem. Thank you!