You can also use your keyboard in combination with your mouse to do some
productivity and efficiency mods to Chief Architect.
We talked a little bit about the right-click editing in that previous section.
Another tip in Chief is that you can use the alt key on your keyboard in
combination with the left mouse click to do a lot of those same types of
functionalities.
So if you don't like your right mouse button or for some reason you always have
a hand on your keyboard, if you just click on, you know,
any object that you're going to modify. In this case,
we have a staircase and I hold my alt key down on my keyboard and grab an end
handle,
then I get that arcing behavior that we saw with the right mouse.
I can do that for stairs, walls, railings, fences, lines,
a whole bunch of stuff in the program.
Another tip for using the alt key while you're in your camera view.
So right now you can see I'm in select mode, if I use my middle mouse button,
like we talked about, I can pan in this view,
but if I hold down the alt key on my keyboard and then click the middle mouse
button, I'm in orbit. So it allows me to kind of navigate around smoothly.
So this will really help you kind of on the fly,
be able to navigate your scenes and you don't have to go up to the toolbar and
switch between these different navigation modes. So that's pretty cool too.
If you use the control key while you're on your move cursor,
you get free movement of anything.
So that overrides all of the snapping and bumping in chief so you don't have to,
you know, work in the confines of those restrictions.
So that's a nice thing to do when you're especially laying out things like
furniture and trying to, you know, set up more free form looking objects.
Even like these plants,
hold your control key down and then you can move things wherever you want them
to go.
We also have some different resize modes in the preferences of Chief.
So you would see those in this preferences dialog under the edit tools,
and then under behaviors.
You can manually come in here and put yourself into any of these states.
However,
it's much more productive if you use the keyboard hotkeys in order to,
you know, get yourself into this mode automatically.
One of those examples is the resize mode.
So if I want to get into the resize behavior,
I can just hold the X key on my keyboard down and then when I grab one of these
corner handles, it will just resize that entire object.
To show you that behavior without the X key pressed,
what happens when you grab on a corner handle is you can't constrain the
proportions, but again, that X key allows you to retain that scale.
So that's pretty handy, especially if you're doing CAD work.
So over here with my stepping stones,
if I wanted to make a copy of any of these things,
so if I go into copy mode and then use the X key while I'm editing,
then I can quickly, you know,
make different sizes of these stepping stones to create my arbitrary layout for
that path. A similar behavior is the concentric tool.
So if you hold your C key down on the keyboard while you're editing,
and then grab one of those corners,
then you'll see that you have a concentric resize.
So that means that you're getting an equal resize around each edge of the
object. The concentric mode works for openings as well.
So if I select on my window when I try to grab one of these edge handles,
it only resizes one edge. However, if I know I need to resize it equally,
then I can hold down my C key on my keyboard.
Both sides of that opening will resize equally.
Another cool feature that's built into your keyboard with your mouse is the
ability to fillet a corner. So if you don't know what a fillet is,
it's when you can add just kind of a radius to any CAD object.
And that's easy enough if you hold the F key down on your keyboard and then just
drag the corner and then all of a sudden you have this arc.
So that's another way to do that quickly,
especially if you're doing some freeform designing.