CATIA Tip: Bypassing Sketcher Snaps

December 16, 2020 Scott Henderson

​Hello everyone, I’d like to introduce a series of quick, concise articles that cut straight to the chase – CATIA Tips in a Minute or Less. The goal here is to show a common problem and an easy solution for it. These are likely little quality-of-life items that’ll improve your day-to-day experience with CATIA. Some of these you may have seen before. Others, you might just go, “I wish I knew that earlier!”

 

Snapping in a Sketch

One of the great things about Sketcher is the flexibility that it has. It’s relatively easy to create complex sketches quickly. Now, one of the annoying things is that if you have a large sketch, there’s a tendency for new geometry to snap to everything in sight. Technically known as Smart Pick, I tend to think of it as “just snapping.”

In the short clip below, you can see that as I’m trying to draw this line, it’s snapping to other elements inside the sketch and I can’t quite place it where I want.
 

The solution? Hold <shift> while moving the mouse. That’s it. Now, the new line moves where I put my mouse, without being forced to align with anything else.


  

Now, I can draw the line at the angle I want with no fear of accidentally snapping to another edge.

For a deep dive into Sketcher, check out the CATIA: Introduction to Modeling class. Otherwise, stay tuned for another CATIA Tip in a Minute or Less!

About the Author

Scott Henderson

Technical Training Engineer<br><br>Scott Henderson is a Dassault Systèmes Certified Instructor. With expertise in CATIA, DELMIA, and ENOVIA, he has been leading training classes and providing on-site customer support since 2006, focusing primarily in the Automotive industry.

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