Working with objects

Click, swap, color, lock, frame, delete – the contextual menu that handles most per-object actions in Build mode.

Click any object in the viewport and the contextual menu opens above it. Most of what you'd do to a single object lives in that menu: swap its model, change its color, edit transforms, attach details, lock it, frame it, delete it.

Watch

Build mode with a greyboxed SUV selected on a highway. The contextual menu floats below the object: from the left, a swap-model cube, a color swatch, a transform control, a details control, and a three-dot more-options menu; then a divider; then the move gizmo, the snapping magnet with its mode dropdown, and the parent tool

What it does

In a typical 3D pipeline you'd dig through right-click menus or property inspectors to act on an object. Intangible collapses the most common per-object actions into one contextual toolbar that opens on click and closes on deselect. It's the canonical reach point for everything that doesn't require a full panel.

How to use it

Click the object. The menu appears. From left to right, the contents are:

1. Swap model. Opens the Swap Model dialog scoped to similar assets (e.g. swapping a Lambo opens "Vehicles > Land Vehicles" with hierarchical category breadcrumbs).
2. Color / material swatches. A row of round swatches showing available color variants. Not all assets have swatches – most library assets ship in gray. Imported objects don't expose swatches.
3. Transform. Opens the Transform popover with numeric Position (X, Y, Z) and Rotation (X, Y, Z) fields. Use when dragging the gizmo is too coarse. It also switches the viewport handle to the classic gizmo with axis arrows.
4. Details. Opens the Details panel on the left side of the workspace – Name, Description, Reference images.
5. More options. Three-dot menu with secondary actions. See More options menu.
6. Gizmo coordinate space. Small toggle popover with Global and Local options – the same toggle the keyboard shortcut T triggers.
7. Snapping. A magnet button plus a mode dropdown in the properties bar. The dropdown picks what snapping does – Surface snaps position to surfaces, Surface + parent snaps and also parents the object to whatever it lands on, off disables it. Selecting a mode turns snapping on; the magnet button then toggles that mode on or off. See Snapping modes.

Parenting lives in the bottom toolbar, not in this menu – see Parenting below.

Parenting

Parenting makes one object follow another. The child keeps its own offset from the parent; move the parent and the child rides along. Use it to attach a prop to a vehicle, a camera to a rig, or to group set dressing that should travel together.

The parent tool in the bottom toolbar with its Set Parent tooltip, waiting for a click on the target object

Parenting is an explicit mode, entered from the parent tool in the bottom toolbar:

1. Select the object (or objects) that should be the child.
2. Click the Parent tool. The app waits for your next click. Clicks in parent mode don't change the selection.
3. Click the object that should be the parent. The relationship applies and the mode exits.

To clear a parent, enter parent mode and click the floor or the backdrop. The object returns to the floor.

Selecting an object, entering parent mode from the bottom toolbar, and clicking the parent target to apply the relationship

Candidates highlight as you hover in parent mode, so you can see what you are about to attach to before you commit. Hovering the floor highlights the ground, which is how you clear a parent rather than set one.

Parent mode highlighting the candidate under the cursor before the click lands

The mode also exits on Esc or when you switch editor modes. You can't parent an object to itself or to one of its own children – the tool blocks cycles.

Parenting is independent of snapping: snapping an object to a surface doesn't parent it unless the snapping mode is set to Surface + parent – see below.

Attaching to a character

Parenting a prop to a character used to attach it to the character's origin, which meant the prop moved with the figure but ignored the pose. A hat parented to a character did not follow the head.

Since release 2.0.72, dropping an object onto a rigged character with snapping set to Surface + parent attaches it to the point on the skin you dropped it on, and it follows that point through posing and animation. Put the hat on the head and it stays on the head.

Three ways to do it, all needing Surface + parent:

• Move the object onto the character with the smart gizmo
• Hold Ctrl and ⇧ while dragging
• Drag it straight onto the character from the asset library

The dotted parent line ends at the attach point rather than at the character's centre, so you can see what it caught. Select the character and it draws a line to each object attached to its surface.

To move an attachment, snap it onto the same character somewhere else. To remove it, snap it onto something that is not the character, or double-click, or click the backdrop in the parent tool.

A cup dragged onto a character and parented to the hand, ending with the character selected and the cup held

Snapping modes

The snapping dropdown next to the magnet button has three modes:

The snapping mode dropdown open next to the magnet button, showing the Surface and Surface + parent options

Mode	What it does
Surface	Snaps the object's position to surfaces it intersects. Position only – no parent relationship is created.
Surface + parent	Snaps position and parents the object to the surface it lands on.
Off	No snapping.

Selecting a mode from the dropdown turns snapping on; the magnet button then toggles that mode on or off without losing your choice. When you drag an asset in from the library, snap-and-parent is active for that drag, then snapping resets to off.

One spline-specific behavior: when snapping is on, splines snap to surfaces only – they never parent, regardless of mode.

More options menu

The three-dot icon in the contextual menu opens secondary actions:

Action	What it does
Save as Set	Group this object with the current selection into a reusable set. See Sets.
Lock	Protect the object from viewport selection and transforms until unlocked. See Locking objects.
Frame	Camera moves to fill the frame with the object. Same as pressing F.
Delete	Remove the object from the scene. Doesn't go to a recycle bin – be sure.
Edit Populator Target	Adjust how this object interacts with an active populator – masks, surface climbing, exclusion zones. See Populators.
Add LoRA	Attach a fine-tuned LoRA to this object. See LoRAs.

More options popover open over a selected Lambo, showing Save as Set / Lock / Frame / Delete / Edit Populator Target / Add LoRA actions

Locking objects

The floor, the terrain, the building shell, the hero product once it's placed. A scene accumulates objects that are finished, and every stray click that grabs one instead of the thing behind it is a small tax on the rest of the session. Lock them.

Two routes to the same state. Use the lock action on the object's row in the Scene Outliner, or select the object and choose Lock from the More options menu in the properties bar. A lock icon marks the object once it's locked.

A locked object stops responding to the viewport. It won't highlight on hover, it won't select on click, and it can't be dragged, rotated, or scaled. Clicks pass through it to whatever sits behind, which is the point: locking the floor means you can marquee-select the props standing on it without dragging the floor along.

What stays available:

• Selecting it in the Scene Outliner. The lock covers the viewport, not the outliner. Select the row to reach the object's properties.
• Editing its name and description. Both feed the auto-prompt, so a locked object is still fully briefable. Locking a building shell doesn't stop you telling the visualizer what it's made of.
• Snapping other objects onto it. Surface snapping treats a locked object as a valid surface. Drop a chair onto a locked floor and it lands correctly, with the floor still protected.

Unlock from the same place you locked it.

Lock the floor first. It's the object most likely to be grabbed by accident and the one you least often need to move, and locking it makes every subsequent selection in the scene more predictable.

Swap Model

The Swap Model dialog opens scoped to the asset's category. The header carries a breadcrumb (e.g. Vehicles > Land Vehicles) plus a search bar and a grid of compatible thumbnails.

Swap Model dialog open with the Vehicles > Land Vehicles breadcrumb, a search bar, and a thumbnail grid of compatible vehicles (truck, sports car, forklift, semi-truck)

Click a swap target; the new asset inherits position and rotation. The dialog opens scoped to the asset's category, but you can search across all categories using the search bar – swapping a car for a tree is possible if you search for it.

Swapping a model doesn't clear its image reference. If the original object had image reference attached, that reference stays on the new object after the swap. A car with Porsche image reference swapped to an ambulance will render as an ambulance that looks like a Porsche. Remove or replace the image reference after swapping if that's not what you want.

Selecting multiple objects

The default click is single-selection. Marquee select is in the toolbar – click the marquee icon, then drag a box to select every object the box touches. The marquee button deactivates after each use; click it again for each new marquee selection. See Selection and grouping for group-level actions.

Copying and duplicating

Twenty copies of the same crate is twenty placements. Duplicate the one you already positioned instead of placing a twenty-first crate by hand.

Ctrl D / ⌘ D duplicates the selected object. Ctrl C / ⌘ C and Ctrl V / ⌘ V copy and paste it. See Keyboard shortcuts for the rest of the Edit set. With an image on the clipboard rather than a copied object, the same paste attaches that image to the selection as a reference – see Image reference.

The copy does not land on top of the original. It lands one unit away on the ground plane, at the same height, offset along the direction the camera is facing, so it appears beside what you copied rather than hidden inside it.

Paste again and it keeps going. The second paste reuses the offset between the previous two, so repeated pastes march in a line with even spacing instead of stacking. Change the selection and the run starts over.

If the original is gone, or you have switched scene or project, or nothing is selected, there is nothing to offset from and the paste lands in the middle of the view instead, on the floor plane where you are looking.

Hold Alt and drag the classic gizmo without leaving the viewport: it duplicates the selected object as you drag. On a Mac that is Option, the same key. The classic gizmo is the one with axis arrows. It is not what you get by default: objects open on Smart Transform, which is a different gizmo. Tab switches between them with a selection active. See Transform.

It is the copy you drag, not the original. The moment the duplicate is made, selection transfers to it, so the original stays exactly where it was and the new one follows your cursor. Objects marked to prevent duplication are skipped: the drag just moves them.

To duplicate from a row rather than the viewport, right-click the object in the Scene Outliner and choose Duplicate. The copy inherits the original's parent and lands at a position offset.

Copy and paste reach past whole objects. Transforms, colors, prompts and keyframes can all be copied and pasted, so a value you set once gets reused instead of retyped, and input fields carry a copy control for the value they hold.

Physics

Give an object the physics attribute and it stops being scenery. It falls, it collides, and it reacts when something pushes it.

1. Select the object.
2. Open the object menu. It carries Save as Set, Lock, Frame, Move Camera Inside, Apply Physics, Delete, and Add LoRA.
3. Choose Apply Physics.

This is a drop, not a switch. The object falls, collides with what is under it, and once it stops moving its resting position is saved as its new transform. The simulation then ends. You are using physics to place the object, not to leave it simulating: drop a crate onto uneven ground and it settles into the ground properly instead of you nudging it by hand until it looks right.

While a drop is still running, the same menu offers Stop Physics in place of Apply Physics, which ends it where the object currently is.

The menu item takes no settings. You pick it and the drop runs.

It is offered for models, primitives and cameras, characters included. Dropping a camera is allowed and occasionally useful. It is not offered for motion paths, waypoints or other gizmo-only objects, which have no real bounds and would fall as arbitrary boxes, nor for populators, extrudes or splats, which would give up their real collision shape for a crude box while simulating.

Limits and known issues

All assets are gray by default. Library assets and imported models alike arrive without color or texture. Use color swatches if available on the specific asset, or attach image reference to apply surface treatment at render time. Imported models are stripped of their source materials on import and don't preserve textures from the original file.

• Delete is immediate. No confirmation, no undo beyond Cmd+Z. If you delete something you wanted to keep, undo right away.
• Swap stays inside the asset's category. The Swap Model dialog opens scoped to the asset's category breadcrumb (e.g. Vehicles > Land Vehicles). Swapping across categories isn't a path the dialog offers.
• Alt-drag is not in the shortcuts panel. It works, on both platforms, but neither Keyboard shortcuts nor the in-app panel lists it, so it is easy to never discover.

Related

• Asset library
• Transform
• Object details
• Selection and grouping
• Sets
• Scene Outliner