Viewport tools

Select a node and its tool appears in the viewport. There is no tool palette to pick from.

Many nodes hand you mouse-driven handles in the scene, so placement, drawing and posing happen directly instead of through numbers. Whatever you do with the handles is written back into that node's controls. The viewport's own toolbar carries view chrome only: zoom, projection, overlays and the like.

The transform gizmo

Which gizmo you get follows the node. A node carrying transform parameters and sitting in the 3D scene gets the move/rotate/scale gizmo. A node promoted to its own layer gets a flat corner box instead. A filter or adjustment, which consumes what it is fed, gets no gizmo at all.

• G for move: three axis arrows, plus flat plane handles for sliding along two axes at once and a square at the origin for free movement

• R for rotate: three rings, one per axis, plus a screen-aligned outer ring

• S for scale: three axis handles plus a centre cube for uniform scale

• X, Y, Z lock the drag to a single axis

• Enter confirms, Esc cancels

The gizmo holds the same size on screen at any zoom, and a crosshair marks the anchor in every mode. Snapping does not apply: see The viewport for why the snap toggles are inert.

Pen

Select a Pen node to draw and edit bezier paths in the viewport.

• Click drops a corner point

• Click and drag makes a smooth point with symmetric handles, and holding Alt on that first drag breaks the tangent

• Double-click a point cycles its handle style

• Shift+drag constrains to 45°

• Backspace or Delete removes the last point, Esc finishes by deselecting the node

• Right-click a point to delete it, and click the first point with three or more down to close the path

Warp grid

Select a Warp node for a deformation grid laid over the content. Drag the grid's control points to push and pull the shape underneath, with live feedback as it bends. In Bezier mode each point also carries tangent handles. The grid needs an incoming image to lay itself over, so an unconnected Warp shows nothing.

Pose

Select a Pose or Skeleton node to pose a rig by hand. Click a joint to select it, then drag horizontally to rotate it about Z at half a degree per pixel. Vertical movement is ignored, and this is forward kinematics on one axis rather than free 3D joint placement.

Raster brush

Select a Raster Brush node and the viewport becomes a canvas: strokes paint straight onto the image, and the stroke is recorded into the node. No gizmo is drawn for it, so a drag always paints.

Shift+[ and Shift+] step the brush opacity. The [, ] and E shortcuts are bound but point at parameter names this node does not carry, so they do nothing; set size and erase on the node instead. Pen pressure is not read, so a tablet behaves as a mouse.

Scene pick

Select a Scene Pick node for a crosshair you drag over the render. It samples the rendered image at that point and outputs the colour, world position, normal, depth and UV there, plus whether anything was hit. It reports what is at a pixel rather than which object was picked, so there is no object identity to wire downstream.

Point and Vision trackers

Select a Point Tracker or Vision Tracker node and the viewport offers markers to place and drag.

The markers are not connected to the trackers. Both tools read and write a parameter name their node does not declare, so the overlay always comes up empty and nothing you place reaches the tracking. Seed the trackers through their input pins for now.

Gradient

Select a Gradient node and the viewport shows the ramp's two endpoints as draggable handles, which set where the gradient starts and ends. The colour stops themselves are edited on the node, not in the scene.

Stamp

Select a Stamp node for an interactive instancer. Each drag in the viewport authors one placement: the press point sets the position, the drag distance sets a uniform scale, and the drag angle sets the rotation about Z. A drag under about 4 px counts as a plain click and stamps at scale 1 with no rotation. Press an existing stamp to move it, or Shift+press to re-scale and rotate it. See Layers & scenes on nodes for how the results sit in the scene.

Selecting geometry components

A Select node gives point, edge and face selection on a mesh. Click a component to pick it, Shift+click to add, or drag a box to grab everything in the region.

The picked set does not have to be all-or-nothing. Set radius above 0 on the node, in world units, and neighbours within that distance are graded down from 1 to 0 by the falloff curve, which offers Smooth, Linear, Constant and Soft. At the shipped radius of 0 the selection stays a hard 1 or 0. There is no viewport gesture for the radius: it is a number on the node, and the value the viewport carries alongside the selection is not read by anything, so nothing on screen shows the falloff yet.

See also

• The viewport for navigating and reading the viewport

• Creating & wiring nodes for selecting and connecting nodes

• Cameras for moving and looking through cameras

• Recording live input for capturing drags over time