Place Tool
This is an interactive tool used for placing the objects on the polygonal surfaces. When you choose this tool, two handles will be displayed; the cube shaped handle is used to scale the object and the hemisphere shaped handle is used to rotate the object. To place an object on the surface of any other polygonal object, you need to click on the surface of the object so that the cube shaped handle and hemisphere shaped handle are not selected. Next, drag the object to the desired place. When you press the CTRL key along with this tool, you can create the copies of the objects to be placed. When you press and hold the left mouse button on the Place tool, a flyout will be displayed. In this flyout, the Scatter Pen and the Dynamic Place tools are available, refer to Figure 1.
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Figure 1 The flyout displayed |
Scatter Pen
This tool is used to randomly distribute the polygonal objects just like painting the object on the surface. You can modify the distribution of the objects by changing the settings in the Attribute Manager. You can also delete some of the distributed objects if you do not want them in the scene. Figure 2 shows grass added to the scene using the Scatter Pen tool.
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Figure 2 Grass added to the scene using the Scatter Pen tool |
Dynamic Place
This tool is used to simulate the falling objects as if gravity is applied to them. Note that this process also involves orientation of object(s) and this orientation is affected mainly by collision or friction with other objects. To dynamically place the object(s), select the object(s), press the SHIFT key and then drag them in the viewport. When you choose this tool, four handles are displayed on the selected object, namely: Rotation handle, Scale handle, Move handle, and Group handle. The group handle is used to place multiple selected objects simul¬taneously.
Asset Browser
Asset Browser is used to provide access to assets like objects, scenes, nodes, materials, images, and so on. Figure 3 shows the Asset Browser. It has the Category area located at the left where categories are displayed in a tree view. At the right of the Category area, an Asset list is available which displays the assets based on the categories selected in the Category area. You can search for the desired asset in the scene using the search field located above the Category area. You need to double-click on the desired asset to get it loaded in the respective manager. Alternatively, you can also drag and drop the asset to the respective manager. Figure 4 shows the scene where objects such as car, trees, and plants added to it using the Asset Browser.
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