Viewport tools

Most viewport tools appear automatically the moment you select the node they belong to — no toolbar to hunt through.

DNA's viewport is more than a preview. Many nodes hand you a set of mouse-driven handles right in the scene, so you can drag, draw, and pose instead of typing numbers. The rule is simple: select the node, and its tool lights up in the viewport. Whatever you do with the handles is fed straight back into that node's controls.

The transform gizmo

Select almost any object — a shape.circle, a mesh.cube, some shape.text — and you get the move/rotate/scale gizmo. It's the everyday tool for placing things in the scene.

The gizmo stays the same size on screen no matter how far you zoom, and snapping (to the grid or to other objects) kicks in as you drag. Hold Alt while dragging to leave a duplicate behind — the original stays put, the copy follows your cursor. This works for single objects and whole selections.

Selecting more than one object gives you a shared gizmo around the whole group, so you can move or rotate everything together.

Pen

Select a Pen node to draw and edit bezier paths directly in the viewport — the same workflow you'd expect from any vector tool.

Warp grid

Select a Warp node and you get a deformation grid laid over your 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 gets tangent handles for smoother curves.

Pose and skeleton

Select a Pose node to grab a skeleton's joints in the viewport and pose them by hand. Drag a joint and the rig follows. It's the direct, hands-on way to animate a character or rig instead of dialling joint angles one at a time.

Raster brush

Select a raster brush node and the viewport becomes a canvas — paint strokes straight onto your image with the mouse or a tablet. This is also how the eraser and other paint tools work: the stroke you draw is recorded into the node.

While a brush is active, the gizmo steps aside so your drag paints instead of moving the object.

Scene pick

Select a Scene Pick node, then click an object in the viewport to capture which object you picked. Handy for pointing one part of your graph at a specific thing in the scene without wiring it up by hand.

Point and Vision trackers

Select a Point Tracker or Vision Tracker node to place and adjust tracking markers in the viewport. Drop a marker on a feature in your footage and the tracker follows it over time — the foundation for matching motion or pinning content to moving video.

Gradient editor

Select a Gradient node (or a Colour Field set to gradient mode) and the viewport shows draggable stops you can move, recolour, and re-space in place. It's the visual way to author a gradient without leaving the scene.

Stamp

Select a utility.stamp node and you get an interactive instancer: drag in the viewport to author each placement — position, rotation, and scale — and your upstream template is stamped down once per drag. Great for quickly scattering copies of something by hand. See Layers & scenes on nodes for how the results sit in your scene.

Selecting geometry components

A Select node gives you point / edge / face selection on a mesh. Click a component to pick it, or drag a box to grab everything in the region. DNA detects what's actually under your cursor even when it's behind other geometry, so you select what you see.

See also