Can I enable "snapping" for objects when dragging?

[flashvenom]

Snapping to grid is great, but it forces me to resize certain objects if I want everything to align perfectly. Is there a way to enable simple snapping of objects? In Illustrator, they took this to the extreme with the little visual "cues" (arrows) and I was really frustrated when my Google searches came up empty in attempting to find a similar feature in AE11.

Am I missing something?

[Mylenium]

There is no snapping in AE, it's as simple as that. You can use The Align palette of course for some tasks or craft your own expressions to emulate the functionality...

Mylenium

[flashvenom]

Thanks for the quick response. Seems like a very simple feature that should be relatively easily implemented at some point.

[Dave_LaRonde]

Well, you CAN snap in AE, but it may not work the way you'd like.  You can snap to a guide layer or to a grid, for example.

Here's the info in AE's online Help.

Look for the section called, "Safe sones, grids, guides and rulers"

[Todd_Kopriva]

This is something that we're looking into right now. Tell us, exactly how would you like this to work? What items do to want to snap to what other items? Are there other applications that you think do a good job with this?

[flashvenom]

I knew it would be, and my answer is as simple as this: InDesign. As a graphic designer who does occasional video work, I would love to see InDesign snap functionality. For dragging, resizing, etc. Lots of visual cues. The arrows and lines used as alignment "hints" in InDesign are perfect (I believe that functionality was polished/fleshed out in CS5). Obviously the ability to turn the UI cues on and off would be helpful as well since I know some of my designer friends say they are annoying. I, however, have a very symatrical creative style so not having snapping in a UI slows me down conciderably.  Items to snap together would be: film clips, shapes (masks), text (boxes), images, etc. Probably in 3d mode this would take more thought on how to implement, but InDesign does the 2d snapping flawlessly and I would have been perfectly happy with that. I'm still a novice AE user, but I'm sure there are more objects where visual snapping/cues would be helpful. Please make sure when we mask out a film clip, the snapping happens at the mask level, not the original object.

If we were trying to take it to the next level, I always wanted (in other Adobe apps as well) a way to create "internal" guides I could snap to. For instance, if I had a film clip of a stack of boxes, I could create guides along the edges of the boxes that would be "masked" inside the object/clip, so other objects could snap to it but my whole scene wouldn't be a skitzo-looking-grid. Just a thought.

Thanks for listening Todd. I am a huge fan of Adobe for this very reason. Adobe seems to be more in the trenches with us professionals, not riding the high horse (Apple).