Proximity Snap add-on fixes clipping and gaps between meshes in Blender with a single button — and it's free

A developer going by the handle rinvo has publicly released Proximity Snap — a Blender add-on that pulls selected vertices toward the nearest surface of another object and holds them at a set distance from it. It all comes down to pressing a single button: there is no need to assign a modifier, specify a reference object or switch on manual snapping.

The typical situations the tool was written for: mesh clipping, gaps between a road surface and the landscape, retopology. The add-on started out as the author's personal tool — he explains the release by saying it turned out to be too useful to keep in a drawer.

One button instead of a modifier and manual snapping

The author describes the logic in the narrowest possible terms: find the nearest object and sit at a set distance from it. The add-on determines targets on its own, and it only works with visible objects — to narrow down the list of targets, it is enough to isolate the meshes you need in the viewport. Multiple targets are handled at once with no extra setup. Besides mesh vertices, the tool can also move curve control points.

“With some settings this saves me more time than any Geometry Nodes setup I've managed to build so far, and the gap is huge. If you've ever had to align a bunch of vertices at a set distance from a surface, you know how painful it is. Setting up modifiers? Specifying the right objects? Or snapping by hand? Now it's one button,” rinvo writes.

The parameter set is compact:

• Target type — the type of target: surface, edge or vertex;
• Distance from the target — the distance a vertex keeps from the target;
• Direction priority — direction priority: None, Over, Under, Only Over (de-clipping) and Only Under;
• Distance limits — the distance limit beyond which elements that are too far away are ignored;
• Projection — the projection mode: by nearest point (Closest) or along the projected normal (Projected normal);
• Smoothing — smoothing of the resulting positions.

There is also the option to assign your own hotkeys. According to the author, he has lately been using the tool for retopology, building racing tracks and modelling all sorts of things — from cars to clothing.

Where to get it and why the archive might upset your antivirus

The add-on is free. You can pick it up on the Proximity Snap page, as well as on BOOTH and Jinxxy, where it is posted as a free item. The archive is tiny — around four kilobytes. The author phrases compatibility cautiously: it has been tested on Blender 5.0 and newer, and it will most likely work on earlier versions too, since the add-on is built very simply.

Because of a sharp spike in downloads, third-party automated scanning systems flagged the zip archive as potentially unsafe. The author cannot influence this and suggests that anyone who wants to can unpack the archive themselves and study the source code before installing.

Why a tool like this was needed right now

Blender's built-in features cover the task from two sides, but a gap remains between them. Snapping in the viewport pulls elements toward the nearest geometry, but it places them directly on the surface — no offset is provided for. Shrinkwrap does support an offset, but it is a modifier applied to the whole object, and it can be limited by a vertex group rather than by the current selection in edit mode. In Geometry Nodes, the Geometry Proximity node returns the nearest point and the distance, while the offset along the normal has to be assembled by hand. Proximity Snap is probably in demand precisely because it occupies this niche — a one-off operation on a selection, with an offset and a direction priority.

Against the backdrop of small free helpers for specific operations multiplying in the Blender community, Proximity Snap looks like a continuation of the trend: modellers' pipelines are accumulating narrowly targeted tools, each of which removes one repetitive step. Such utilities usually grow out of the author's personal routine — this case is no exception.

The limitations are worth keeping in mind too: the code is distributed as a file along with the build, rather than through a catalogue with automatic updates. For a studio pipeline with formal requirements for code provenance this may become an obstacle; for a personal project, hardly. If interest in the tool holds up, the logical next step would be publishing it in the Blender extensions catalogue.