Placing figures

colinmac2

I've read that you can place and move figures easily by holding down ALT + left mouse button and gliding to where you want the figure. For some reason, this feature isn't working for me.  A piece of the character lights up, but nothing moves.

Another problem I'm having is that when I want to move, say, a hand or a forearm, I have to go to Scene> expand all/ Expand from selected. Why can't I just click on a bodypart and have the parameters come up?

Richard Haseltine

The Alt-drag placement is for loadign items - click on the item in a content pane, hold down the alt key (opt for Mac), drag into the scene and when the target icon is in the desired spot release the mouse button, then the key.

For posing, which tool is checked in the Tools menu? By default the first time you click on a non-selected figure with a node-selection tool the figure will be seelcted, the second and subsequent clicks will select the bone under the cursor. Dragging with the Universal tool will pull on the bone under the mouse as long as the figure or a bone on the figure is selected. The Universal, Translate, Rotate, and Scale tools will show viewport gizmos/manipulators (as long as the seelcted bone has those properties) which can be used to manipulate the bone by dragging on hot-spots (which highlight on mouse-over). If you have a bone selected and want to affect the figure double-click. When positioning it is best to use the figure, otherwise (using the hip to translate) the geometry will be separated from the figure node, which can be confusing.