Hi! Renderdome 2 reminded me of a technique I used a lot, where I could snap surfaces to a point locater that showed up in F4 and F8. Handy. Doesn’t seem possible anymore. (note: this image is from an old Smoke on Mac tutorial). Anybody know if this is still available? Thanks!
@Randy_G when I create a 3D camera track, using analyser mono inside action, I get the option to create axis or locators. I think this might be what you are looking for.
thank you. yes I use locators. can you hold shift and snap an axis to them? I parent them traditionally.
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I’ll be honest I haven’t used them. I saw them in a demo and it looked really good. I tend to use axis to find a wall or a floor. I don’t think locators guarantee a good floor plane do they?
I would love it if I could choose four axis and flame would create a plane for me. It can be almost impossible for me do this with the front top side views.
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So snapping vertices of bicubics and exbicubics should work. I use Smoke hotkeys. Rumor has it the Shift-snap in Flame Hotkeys is double assigned…check out the hotkey editor…search for “Snap” and see “Snap Object to Point” and “Snap Object to Z Depth.” Reassign the z depth one and boom, that should work.
Thanks to @eric_mason.
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Could’ve used this a week ago Randy!
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DID YOU ASK KIRK? YOU KNOW I WANT MORE WINE!
love ya.
sorry.
And thanks to @p2FX!
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The hero we need. @p2fx! I don’t care what everybody says about you. You swell.
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I think you mean SWOLE. 
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That used to work but had been since at least 2020 version, probably 2019 as well. I opened a bug report with Autodesk support team months ago.
Never had feedback.
It might have been fixed in 2021… or not.
I’m still in 2020.3 and still doesn’t work at all.
It works. You have to set the Snap to Z Depth hotkey as something other than Shift Click. Flame 2021.2.
Great it’s been fixed then. I’m still on 2020.3 but will move forward to 2021 soon… hopefully.
Thx
thanks for the snap shift advice! great. I think my problem is simpler. And this may not exist. I’ve marked this link, and the feature here, no longer shows up on my f4 view. so it seems impossible to snap. if this link doesn’t start at the right point, I will flag it. thank you.
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Hahah! Thank you @kirk! Dude you didn’t actually have to send wine.
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Ah. So, this explicit behavior USED to be the case, but, somewhere between 2015 and 2019 there is a new camera view…shoot, I think its F7 or F8 where you see the camera tracking points in the viewport.
In other words, that tutorial is obsolete in the fact that the viewports have changed. @eric_mason has some experience in this world. I just shift snap in the F4 view where the points are there to snap but are invisible…there’s gotta be a way for them to show up…
So, you’re not going mad. It’s a combination of an outdated tutorial and me knowing you can but not knowing how to recreate the steps for the current software to act like it did in the tutorial.
do you mean shift snap doesn’t work?
yes. thank you. LIVE PREVIEW needs to be disabled to see locator boxes in F4. a 6 1/2 year old memory comes back thanks to this chat!
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Place your bets
Creating a plane from a bunch of locators…
I think you can do this - make the child axis take on a centroid transform I think? It defaults to not taking on the transforms from above.
Not on a box for the next few days but it definitely used to be possible.
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It would be a good trick to have up my sleeve. When you get a spare min on the box can you take a look and get back to me?
Not sure how to achieve this:
Thanks