Placing Shapes When Importing, Pasting, and Creating
on this page: importing | pasting
| creating | interactive
placement
You can interactively place shapes on import, paste, and creation. This
means that the object first appears "stuck" to the cursor.
Move the cursor over your work area and click to place the shape. Drag
your cursor to resize the shape and let go to place it. Details on interactive placement
appear below.
You can instead place an imported
or pasted
object in its original coordinates by
turning off interactive placement.
Interactive placement is the only way to place a basic shape when you
click one of the creator buttons on the Create palette.
How you place a shape on import depends on
whether you have Interactive Import Placement turned on. By
default, it is turned on the first time you launch Cosmo Worlds.
Find it: Choose File > Interactive Import Placement
Deselect Interactive Import Placement to place the object in its
original coordinates; that is, the location the object last appeared in
its native environment before you imported it.
How you paste an object that you have cut or copied depends on whether
you have Interactive Paste Placement turned on. By default, it
is turned on the first time you launch Cosmo Worlds.
Find it: Choose Edit > Interactive Paste Placement
Deselect Interactive Paste Placement to place the shape in its original
coordinates.
Shape creators let you interactively place, size, and scale basic
shapes. Click on a button and interactively place in your work area.

-
When you import, paste, or create a shape, a wireframe version of the
object appears under the cursor.
-
Move your mouse in the
scene, but don't click yet.
-
The object will:
-
Snap to a snap target if one is in the scene (object axes match snap
target axes).
-
Follow surfaces.
-
Appear midway between front and back clipping planes
. The object aligns to world
space axes. The direction of your object matches the world axis closest
to "up" in screen space.
-
Click to create the object at the size you see.
-
Drag-release to size an object before placing it.
-
Drag-release to scale
proportionally. Drag out from the starting point. The
direction of your gesture chooses from four possible dragging lines
that match the diagonals of the bounding cube. As you drag along the
line, you'll make the object bigger/smaller.
-
Shift-drag-release
to stretch. Press the Shift key and three orange
arrows appear. Your next gesture picks from among the three directions
for non-proportional scaling. When you move far enough, the chosen
direction is displayed with a single yellow arrow.
-
Other Resizing Key Combinations
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Sweeping Out Corner-to-Corner (Ctrl-drag)--By
default, the object is swept from the bottom-center point out to the
corner. So the initial click denotes the center of the object's base.
If, instead, you want to sweep out from one corner of the bounding cube
to the opposite corner, hold Ctrl when you drag
out.
-
Switching Back and Forth--You can switch back and forth
between scale and stretch by pressing/releasing the Shift
or Ctrl key as you drag.
-
Negative Scales--The creators will come up with
equivalent transforms to put the object in the same place but without
any negative scaling.