Place your first objects

Drag objects from the asset library, place them on the ground, swap, snap, and lock so they stop drifting on you.

Object placement is where most users hit their first wall: things spawn somewhere unexpected, scale to zero and become unselectable, or disappear into a scene with no obvious way to find them. This page covers all three.

Build mode with the asset library expanded along the bottom, My Assets category active, ready to drag a chair or other prop into the empty scene

What's getting in the way

Three problems account for most of the early friction: objects appear in unexpected places, aligning them is fiddly, and scaling one to zero makes it unselectable and hard to delete. The steps below cover all three.

How to do it

1

Open the asset library

The library isn't open by default. In Build mode, click Add an Asset to bring it up along the bottom of the screen; click away into the scene to dismiss it. Categories tab across the top: Characters, Furnishings, Mannequins, My Assets, Objects, Populators, Primitives, Roads, Sets, Vehicles.

2

Drag the asset into the viewport

Click and drag a thumbnail. The library auto-minimizes the moment you start dragging so you can see the 3D scene. The asset lands at the cursor's projected ground point. Hold Ctrl while dragging to snap the asset onto another surface you're hovering over instead of the ground.

3

Let go, then select the object

Release the asset, then click it in the viewport. The contextual menu opens above it with the swap, color, transform, details, and more-options controls. The default handle is a simplified smart gizmo; for the classic move gizmo with axis arrows, click the transform control in the menu. Tab toggles the gizmo type, and T switches between World and Local space.

4

Adjust the position

Drag the gizmo arrows for axis-locked movement, the small squares between arrows for plane movement, the elevation handle for vertical lift. Local space moves the object along its own axes; World space along the scene's. For precise placement, type values into the contextual menu's transform panel directly.

5

Lock it once it's right

Click the lock icon in the contextual menu's more-options. A locked object can't be hovered, selected, or moved in the viewport until you unlock it, though its row in the Scene Outliner stays selectable. Lock the terrain and any large populator backbone before you start adding props on top of them; you'll stop dragging the world by accident, and props still snap onto a locked surface normally.

Avoiding the most common mistakes

Don't scale all three axes to zero. It makes the object unselectable from the viewport and unreachable from the gizmo. Recover via the Scene Outliner: find the object by name, right-click, reset transforms.

Don't lose objects off-screen. Smart snapping plus a fast drag occasionally launches an object outside the viewport. Open the Scene Outliner, select the row, press F to frame.

Swapping models

If the chair you dragged in isn't quite the chair you wanted, click the object and pick the swap-model icon – the leftmost icon in the contextual menu. The library reopens in swap mode and only shows alternatives the system recognizes as the same concept (chairs, in this case). One click to swap; the new asset inherits the original's position and rotation.

Selecting multiple objects

The default click is single-selection. To select a group:

1. Click the marquee icon in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen, next to the asset-library icon.
2. Drag a selection box across the viewport.
3. Apply a transform, swap, or save-as-set to the whole selection.
4. The marquee toggles off after one use; click again to re-engage.

Related

• Asset library
• Working with objects
• Transform
• Scene Outliner
• Sets