Working With The Imagine and Shape Product

General Principles

Remote Control

The entire screen reacts to selections and manipulations.
Elements and handles can be remote-activated: the mouse cursor does not need to be over an the element or very close to interact. The element that is closest to the mouse cursor is selected. For elements such as faces or edges, the selection point is their barycenter.
This gives you a real productivity gain and a very fast interaction with elements and handles.

Using a trap as a selection means is advised. Simply press Shift and draw the trap using the left-mouse button. As a combination, you can press Ctrl to add or remove elements to the selection.
Elements are selected if their barycenter is included in the trap.

To manipulate and deform a curve or a surface, it is advised to double-click the curve or surface rather than clicking Modification in the right-hand toolbar. This helps you improve the productivity.

Escape Key

Use the Escape (Esc) key to exit a command.

Smart Selection

When selecting a feature and launching any command, all the feature's fathers (subdivision surfaces or styling curves) are temporarily highlighted to enable an easy selection. The selected feature is also temporarily hidden.

Positioning of the Created Geometry

When an element (point, line, plane) is already selected before entering a command, it is used to define the position and orientation of the created primitive.
For instance, one point defines the barycenter, two points define the main axis and the middle of the points define the barycenter, three points define a plane and the normal to the plane defines the main axis, a line defines the main axis and its origin defines the barycenter, and a plane's origin defines the barycenter and the normal to the plane defines the main axis.

Centered on point

Centered on line

Centered on plane

Step by Step Modification

This capability is available with the Translation, Local Normals, Mesh Lines, and Rotation commands.
To select the elements to be manipulated, press Ctrl and move the pointer to automatically compute the step. By default, the step corresponds to a multiple of power of 10 for the translation commands or of 5° degrees for the rotation command.

If you move the elements to a required value and then press Ctrl, the next manipulations are in the steps of this value or the nearest multiple of power of 10 to this value.

Fast Manipulation

When modifying an object, you can manipulate the nearest element to the pointer without selecting it.
From the Tools Palette, you can select Manipulator On/Off

. The compass becomes smaller in size and it places itself on the nearest element to the cursor, which needs to be manipulated. It is no longer displayed on the barycenter of the selected elements, even in case of multi-selection.

Some Advice

You are advised to:

add a geometrical set and create the styling surfaces within this geometrical set.
create two other geometrical sets for operations and for operations' results.
apply a pre-defined material on a subdivision surface.
verify that the Material option is checked in the View > Render Style > Customize View command in order to visualize the mapping analysis on the surface.
set the discretization option proportionally to the element size: in Tools > Options > General > Display > Performance, set the 3D Accuracy > Proportional option to 0.1.
activate anti-aliasing in Tools > Options > Display > Visualization, check the anti-aliasing for Edges/Lines option.
set the line thickness 2 to 1 (instead of 2 by default): in Tools > Options > General > Display > Thickness and Font, set the Size in pixel for Thickness 2 to 1.
select Type as 2 in the Tools > Options > Shape > Imagine & Shape > Display tab, Base Mesh, Line area.

Limitations

If you wish to work using the multi-view mode, you first need to either click once in a view or perform a local modification of the view in order to activate the manipulators.
Macro tools are not supported with the Imagine & Shape workbench.