Rotating items



Selected items can be rotated by hitting the 'R' key. This changes the control state to 'rotating', as can be seen from the status bar.

While in the rotating control state the selected objects will rotate with the mouse around either the selection center, or the cursor, depending on the current rotation center setting. You can hit Escape to cancel the change and exit the rotation state.

To confirm the new angle for the items, click the left mouse button.

While rotating, you can hold down the Ctrl key to make the angle jump in discrete steps instead of moving smoothly, or hold down Shift to reduce the movement by a factor of ten for fine control. The step size for the Ctrl key movement can be changed in the Options dialog under the Controls tab.


Rotation center setting
Rotation occurs around a central point which can be either the selection center, or the cursor. This setting can be switched between by hitting the 'R' key again during rotation, or by using the button in the toolbar.

The selection center is the average point of all the selected items, shown by a thin white cross. Rotating around this is useful when you want to rotate without really moving the selection as a whole. The cursor is the red and white striped circle marker which can be placed at any position in the scene.


Rotation across views
If you have more than one view of the same scene, you will see the rotation occurring in all views of that scene, and you can move the mouse into another view to control the rotation there.

In most cases this is not very useful, but occasionally it can be handy to make fine adjustments.