Selecting and Navigating

Use the left mouse button to pick geometry and the right one to move the camera. Reach for this article when a click keeps landing on the wrong thing, when the part has vanished off screen, or when a key does something you did not expect. Which tool appears next, and what a feature attaches to, both follow from what you picked.

Moving the camera

Three mouse buttons do three jobs, and the left one is left alone:

Click versus drag is what lets the right button do two things: turn the model and give you a menu. A quick press and release opens the radial. Anything longer, or with movement, is an orbit.

Zoom in and you stop at a one-centimetre field of view. Zooming out has a limit too, but it sits some four hundred metres wide, far enough that you can scroll until the part is a speck and think you have lost it. Do not hunt for it with the wheel. Press the key that frames everything and it comes back.

The ViewCube

Bottom right sits a small cube that mirrors the camera. Click a face, an edge or a corner and the camera glides to that view. There are 26 of them, so "front", "top-right", and "that corner" are all one click. It appears only in Design's model view, and never while a preview overlay is up.

Inside a sketch that corner belongs to something else. A sketch is locked face-on, so a cube offering 26 viewpoints would be dead weight; in its place sits a small square with two arrows, and one click on either is one quarter turn of the drawing on screen. The roll is yours for as long as the sketch is open and it is never written to the document — reopen the sketch tomorrow and it is upright again.

Picking

Hover highlights what you are about to get. Click takes it.

Internalise Shift, because in Kapy a multi-selection is usually the point. Pick four edges together and you get one fillet feature carrying four edges, not four features. That distinction matters later, when you edit the fillet and want all four radii to change at once.

Box select

Drag with the left button and you get a marquee. The direction you drag decides how it behaves, following the convention CAD users already have in their fingers:

• Left to right paints a blue box and selects only what is entirely inside it.
• Right to left paints a green dashed box and selects everything it touches.

Shift or Ctrl adds the result to what you already had. Alt includes geometry behind solids, exactly as it does for a single click.

While a tool is asking you to pick

Everything above describes picking for yourself. The moment a tool asks for something — the edges of a fillet, the axis of a revolve, the path of a sweep — a pick session takes the viewport over and the rules change, because there the picks are an answer to a question rather than a selection lying around.

• A plain click adds, with no modifier at all. Click an element again and it comes back off the list. Shift and Ctrl are not needed and not wanted.
• A field that takes only one thing replaces instead, and clicking what it already holds does nothing — a required input cannot be emptied by clicking it twice.
• Nothing else can take your picks away. Clicking empty space does not clear them. A box marquee only ever adds, keeping whatever passes what the field will accept, and a box that caught nothing changes nothing. That box is how a fillet's whole edge list gets filled in one gesture.
• Three keys end it, and the banner at the top of the viewport shows them: Enter keeps the picks and leaves, Esc puts back whatever the field held before you started, and c empties the list without leaving.

That last one is worth knowing. While a picker is running the letter c belongs to the picker, so it clears the picks rather than starting a Circle, a Cut or a Coincident.

Selection filters

The Select tool carries a filter (everything, points, edges, planes or bodies) and it does two jobs. When a face keeps stealing the click from the edge you actually want, switch the filter to edges and only edges are pickable.

The filters also unlock the datums that are not really geometry. Set the filter to edges and the world X, Y and Z axes become selectable. Set it to planes and so do the principal XY, YZ and XZ planes. Feed those origin datums to any tool that needs an axis or a plane (revolve, a circular pattern, a mirror) instead of modelling the geometry first.

Why everything goes grey

The moment anything is selected, every body neutralises to grey so the blue of the selection reads against it, then returns to its own colour when you deselect. Nothing has been recoloured, and nothing is broken. A Tour of the Editor covers it too.

Esc and Delete

Delete (or Backspace) removes the current selection, and is ignored while you are typing in a field.

Esc is more specific than in most CAD apps:

• Mid-draw, Esc cancels the shape in progress and returns you to the Select tool. Points the cancelled shape had dropped, and that nothing else uses, go with it, so a cancelled rectangle leaves nothing behind. Anything already closed stays: Esc after a finished segment just ends the chain.
• With nothing in progress, Esc does not leave the sketch. Drawn work is never lost to a stray keypress. The way out is Finish sketch.
• The exception: a sketch you just created and have not drawn in yet is cancelled by Esc. Use that as the "wrong plane, back out" gesture.
• Outside a sketch, with a step's panel open, Esc cancels that step: a step you just added is removed, an existing one goes back to exactly what it was when the panel opened. A picker filling one of its fields gets the key first, so the first Esc ends the pick and the second cancels the step. Editing a Part You Have Built has the rest.

Reading what you selected

The status bar keeps a running measurement of the selection: the length of one edge, the angle between two faces, the radius of an arc in a sketch. There is no measure tool to enter and leave. Select, read, carry on.

What you can hide

Three windows control what is on screen, and none of them changes the model:

• Bodies: hide a body, recolour it, rename it, or make it the active one.
• Sketches: the same for sketches, which is how you get a finished sketch out of the way without deleting it. Nothing ever hides a sketch on your behalf: a sketch is hidden when you hide it and at no other time, so the drawing under an extrude stays on screen until you do.
• References: the same again for reference planes, axes and points, with a trash button beside the eye. Clicking a row also selects that datum in 3D, which is what makes the toolbar offer the tools that consume it.

V is the hide key for both a body and a reference. The two are never offered at the same time — the body entry wants a body in the selection, the reference entry exactly one reference and nothing else — so the letter is never ambiguous.

The Customize window carries the editor's theme and the viewport helpers. Its 3D view section has the coordinate axes, the XY grid and the grid's ruler labels; the labels sit on the grid, so turning the grid off takes them with it. Its Sketch section has two more, the sketch plane's grid and its axes, greyed out until a sketch is open. Turning the sketch grid off clears the background behind the drawing with it; the plane's centre point has no switch, because it is the origin every dimension is measured from.

See also

• A Tour of the Editor: why the toolbar changes as you select
• Keyboard Shortcuts: Esc, Delete and the modifiers
• Working with Several Bodies: what the active body decides