When I start to draw a line, move an object, or any one of many other operations where there is a target that I'll be going to, possible endpoints are marked with little crosses (x) and sometimes some information as to what the point is. I love the idea behind this but with even a moderately complex drawing, I have dozens or even hundreds of crosses appearing. They start covering up the point where I really want to go and make it harder, not easier, to draw. I thought that this would have something to do with object and point snapping, and if I turned them off the crosses would go away. No luck.

I like the little crosses, there are just way too many of them. Is there a way to cut them back to just a few, hopefully the ones that I'm most likely to aim for?
Thanks,
Mark

Hi Mark, if you'd like to turn them off completely, you can do that in moi.ini (use the Edit .ini file button under Options > General), and edit the following setting under the [Drawing Aids] section:

ObjectSnapShowMarkers=y

Switch that to say =n to turn off those markers.

Also you can adjust the opacity if you want to make them fainter, for that lower this setting:

ObjectSnapMarkerOpacity=80


If you lower that to something like 40 or 20, (this is out of 255 maximum value) it will make them fainter.


Also you may want to go to the View palette and uncheck "Display hidden lines", which in addition to turning off the hidden line display will also hide the markers for points that are behind solid objects as well.


> Is there a way to cut them back to just a few, hopefully the
> ones that I'm most likely to aim for?

Yes, you can do this as well, by turning off the different object snap variants that you don't need.

Go to the Object Snap button in the bottom toolbar here:



When you move the mouse over it, an arrow will appear above it, click on that to open up this menu:



You can uncheck items there to disable particular kinds of object snaps.

So for example if you uncheck "Quadrant" there, the object snap will no longer snap to "Quad" points and there will also not be any small cross markers on quadrants as well.


But usually I would recommend just leaving them all turned on, and just ignore those little checks though. They will probably stop bothering you after a while.

If your screen is really dense with them, the problem may be that you are just showing too much stuff currently and it is getting in your way - the main solution for that is to hide chunks of your model to clear things up.

If you wait too long and work in too cluttered of a scene rather than hiding things there are all kinds of things that get to be frustrating, so it is better to try and hide things sooner rather than later.

- Michael

Hi Mark, also one other general tip - in addition to hiding things sooner rather than later, it can also be good to get more in the habit of zooming in a ways when picking points sooner rather than later as well.

Usually when you zoom in, the distance between all those different snap points will increase and it will get easier to identify and target individual ones when there is more separation between things.

It's sort of a good habit to make it sort of a reflex to zoom in to the area that you are working on rather than struggle to try and target many things that are too close together on the screen.

Try and zoom in earlier and use the "Reset" button on the bottom toolbar of the viewport to go back out again rather than always operating at a further distance.

- Michael