Snapping is an important tool in Fusion 360 that allows you to precisely align elements like sketch lines, edges, vertices, faces, axes, and planes. When snapping is enabled, your cursor will “snap” to these geometric entities as you move your mouse, allowing for perfect alignment without having to painstakingly line things up manually.
Enabling snapping can greatly improve your modeling workflow and precision, making it much easier to create dimensional and symmetrical designs. However, snapping can sometimes be confusing for beginners to set up and control. In this guide, we’ll walk through the steps for enabling and customizing snapping in Fusion 360.
What is Snapping?
Snapping, also sometimes called “magnet snapping”, refers to the behavior where your cursor seems to “stick” or snap to certain geometric elements as you move your mouse in the Fusion 360 workspace.
For example, with snapping enabled, as you sketch a line and move your cursor near the endpoint of another line or sketch entity, your cursor will jump and stick to that point. This allows you to easily connect lines and sketch elements precisely.
Snapping allows you to align things perfectly in Fusion without having to carefully move your cursor pixel by pixel to get it just right. It essentially gives your cursor magnetic properties, snapping it to key geometric entities.
Some examples of things that snapping can lock to include:
- Vertices (corners) of sketches and bodies
- Midpoints of lines and arcs
- Endpoints of lines and arcs
- Center points of circles and arcs
- Quadrant points of circles
- Intersections of sketches
- Face centers
- Edge midpoints
- Work planes and axes
Being able to easily snap to reference geometry makes modeling much faster and more precise. You don’t have to carefully move your cursor over the exact vertex you want to select, you can just get close and let snapping do the rest.
Let’s look at how to set up and control snapping behavior in Fusion 360.
How to Enable Snapping
Snapping is enabled by default in Fusion 360, but is easy to toggle on and off using the Snapping dropdown in the view cube toolbar:
To enable snapping:
- Go to the view cube toolbar in the upper right corner of the Fusion window.
- Click the down arrow next to the magnet icon to expand the snapping dropdown menu.
- Make sure there is a checkmark next to the “Use Snapping” option.
If snapping is disabled, simply click the “Use Snapping” option again to toggle it back on.
You can tell snapping is enabled when your cursor becomes a magnet icon as you move over eligible snapping positions.
Snapping Settings and Options
The snapping dropdown menu allows you to control exactly what geometry the cursor will snap to. This lets you customize snapping to suit your workflow.
Here are the different snapping modes and options:
Vertex Snapping – Snaps to vertices and midpoints of sketch curves.
Edge Snapping – Snaps to edge midpoints on 3D model geometry.
Face Snapping – Snaps to planar face centers on 3D geometry.
Body Snapping – Snaps to the center point of bodies.
Intersection Snapping – Snaps to sketch curve intersections.
Axis Snapping – Snaps to work axis start/mid/end points.
Grid Snapping – Snaps cursor to grid line intersections (based on grid settings).
Perpendicular Snapping – Snaps cursor perpendicular to lines and edges.
Tangent Snapping – Snaps cursor tangent to arcs and circles.
Point Snapping – Snaps to any user created point entities.
Midpoint Snapping – Snaps to midpoints of lines and edges.
By default, all snapping modes are enabled. You can toggle them individually off and on to restrict snapping only to the geometry types you want.
For example, you may want to disable Edge Snapping when sketching, since edge midpoints can interfere with connecting sketch lines. Or disable Face Snapping when drawing centerline arcs.
Take advantage of the different snapping modes to improve precision and speed for the specific modeling operation you are working on.
Snapping Distance
You can control how close your cursor needs to be to snap to geometry with the snapping Distance setting:
The default snapping distance is 16 pixels. Increasing this value will cause your cursor to snap from farther away, while decreasing it reduces the “magnetism” effect range.
Setting the ideal snapping distance for your mouse/cursor control allows snapping to kick in only when you intend it to. Play around with the distance setting to find your preferred value.
Controlling Snapping Context
As your models get more complex with additional geometry, snapping can sometimes grab unintended references. For example a nearby vertex might snap even though you meant to select an endpoint.
There are a couple ways to control the snapping context to avoid unwanted references:
1. Reference Geometry
You can isolate snapping to only occur on critical Reference Geometry entities like Work Planes, Axes, and Points.
To enable Reference Geometry snapping context:
- Expand the snapping dropdown
- Check the box next to “Reference”
Now your cursor will ignore all model edges, faces, etc. and only snap to reference geometry.
2. Free Snapping
Alternatively, you can enable Free Snapping to disable all magnetic behavior of the cursor, allowing you to select any point in space unconstrained.
To enable Free Snapping:
- Expand the snapping dropdown
- Check the box next to “Free”
With Free Snapping on, your cursor will ignore all snapping geometry.
Use Free Snapping when other geometry is getting in the way of a point you want to select.
3. Drafting Snapping
The Drafting snapping context isolates snapping specifically to sketch vertices and geometry. This is useful when sketches become cluttered and you only want to snap to other sketch elements.
To enable Drafting snapping:
- Expand the snapping dropdown
- Check the box next to “Drafting”
Drafting mode will restrict snapping to just the current sketch geometry.
Keyboard Snapping Override
A quick way to momentarily override snapping behavior is by holding down the Shift key while you sketch or select.
Pressing Shift essentially activates Free Snapping for as long as the key is held down. This provides a quick method to grab a point in space regardless of surrounding geometry.
Some uses for Shift overriding snapping include:
- Sketching a line without automatically connecting to existing endpoints
- Moving the cursor away from an unwanted snap point
- Rotating a model without snapping to work planes and axes
- Selecting vertices occluded by nearby snapping geometry
So in summary, remember Shift can be used to quickly deactivate snapping so you can freely select any point.
Snapping Settings Recap
Here’s a quick recap on the different settings available to control snapping behavior:
- Individual Snapping Modes – Toggle on/off vertex, edge, face, etc. snapping
- Snapping Distance – Increase or decrease the activation range
- Reference Snapping – Isolate snapping to reference geometry only
- Free Snapping – Disable all snapping and snap to any point in space
- Drafting Snapping – Restrict snapping to just the active sketch
- Press Shift – Temporarily override snapping to any point
Take advantage of these options to optimize snapping for each modeling scenario. Keep the most common snapping modes active, while disabling any that may interfere with your current workflow.
Conclusion
Being able to take full advantage of Fusion 360’s powerful snapping tools will improve your modeling efficiency, precision, and control.
Follow this guide to enable snapping and customize the settings to best suit your workflow. Snap to key geometry, restrict context to avoid clutter, override with Shift when needed.
With a bit of practice, snapping will become second nature and you’ll wonder how you ever modeled without it! Snap to it!