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VII. Pick, Add, Drag. Pick, Add, Drag. Geez, how boring!

         VII. Pick, Add, Drag.  Pick, Add, Drag. Geez, how boring!

There are some useful commands that act on picked objects other than just moving, rotating, and scaling. Two of the most obvious are "Load" and "Save". Load will load a new object in from disk- it will give you a file requester which you can choose the filename from. The most common place to put objects are in your "objects" subdirectory in your project directory.See the Project Editor tutorial for the complete Imagine file structure.

Am important suggestion; use descriptive names and extensions. I talked about this a lot in my Project tutorial, but it's worth repeating. "Obj1" is going to mean nothing to you an hour from now. "tablecloth.iob" tells you that this is an Imagine object of a tablecloth- a useful description. Some suggested file extensions:

 .iob    Imagine Object. Loads into the Detail Editor 
 .iout   Imagine Object which is a faceless outline
 .ifm    Imagine Form. Loads into the Form or Detail Editor
 .iff    Amiga picture or brush  (standard)
 .ham    Amiga picture or brush in Hold-And-Modify format
 .iff24  24-bit Amiga picture of brush. Highest quality.
 .spth   Imagine spline path
 .lpth   Imagine line path
  Save will take the picked object or group and save it onto disk. Note that

Another command you can apply to picked objects is "Snap to Grid" from the Functions menu. It operates on all picked objects, moving each of them so that their axis lies on top of the nearest grid intersection. This is very useful in trying to line up objects or for precise positioning. This is much like a one-time "Lock".

There are a few other utility object commands. "Cut", "Copy", and "Paste" are found in the Object menu. "Cut" will remove your object from the Imagine world and store it in memory. When you select "Paste", the object will be re-inserted into the world at the same place it was prior to the cut. In fact, the object is STILL retained in memory, so you can move the restored object around and use "Paste" again to get a second copy to manipulate. You can repeat "Paste" as many times as you like to get copies of objects. "Copy" is like cut, except the object is not removed from the world after being copied to memory. You can use "Paste" to add multiple copies to the world.

Since the pasted objects are all put in the same location, often you'll have to move one copy to get to the next. Judicious use of "Redraw" can help in showing exactly what copies are still floating around.

An incredibly useful command for making complex objects is called "Join", which can be found in the Functions menu. If you pick two or more objects, join will assemble them into one single object. The new conglomerate object will have use the axis of the first object that was picked, and will contain all of the points, edges, and faces of all of the joined objects. Joined objects are difficult to unjoin later, so only use it when you WANT a solid object. Join is used constantly- you might build a car with the body sides, and "join" on a side mirror, then join the roof on, then join the floor. Remember the advantages of groups though; you probably DON'T want to join the tires to the car; if you group them you can rotate them later, as well as define the chrome hubcap separately from the car's paint and the rubber tire.

"Merge" is also found in the Functions menu. It is more of a utility command. It will remove any duplicate faces, edges or points in your object. Especially after you JOIN objects, you might have a lot of points lying on top of one another. Merge removes these extra, unneeded points, speeding rendering and even display in the editors. Merge also helps Phong shading; more about Phong shading in the soon to come Attribute Tutorial.

Delete is pretty obvious command. It can also be found in the Functions menu. When you use delete, every picked object will be removed from the world. This command is used a lot to get rid of cruft and deadwood, so knowing the keyboard shortcut of right-amiga-d is useful.

As with all of the editors, Imagine has one level of "Undo", which can be selected from the Project menu. When using dangerous commands like Delete, being able to recover from the command is important. Undo will work with almost any command. You can also undo an undo, reinstating a command you decided you wanted anyway.

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