Concepts
The few ideas behind the document.
Levels and layers
#A level is a floor of the building with an elevation and a height, and everything belongs to one. Layers group things by department and can be hidden.
Materials
#A material is a color or a tiled texture with a real-world size. Walls have inside, outside and top materials, and floors, rooms and items have one. A door has its leaf and, on a glazed look, its glass. A window has its glass, its frame and, once something hangs in it, its fabric.
Shots
#A shot remembers where the cameras, people and marks are (or, with full scope, every item, light and probe too). Applying a shot moves them back, and the set, reference images and materials never change. The layout is shared, so applying a shot moves things for everyone in the project.
Mounts and pins
#Lights placed near a stand snap onto its pin and follow it. Boxes stack on tables and risers.
Aim targets
#A light aimed at a mark, item or camera keeps pointing at it when either moves.
Snapping
#Positions snap to the grid and to corners and walls, and rotations to the angle step. Alt turns snapping off for one drag. Duplicate (Ctrl+D) offsets the copy one grid step, and the arrow keys nudge the selection one step, ten with Shift.
Units
#The document is metric inside. The display units are a preference: ft-in shows feet and inches everywhere.
Branches
#A branch is your own copy of a project that remembers the project it came from and the version it left.
Making one
- Who
- Anyone who can open a project can branch it, as long as their account may create projects.
- Where
- The project card's menu, the Project menu, the phone's Menu or the command palette.
- Yours
- You own the branch, and it is shared the way your new projects are. Nobody from the original comes with it, and changing it never touches the original.
- Projects page
- A branch is grouped after its original and names it, the group sitting where its most recently edited project would. The original says how many branches it has.
- Hidden originals
- A branch of a project you cannot open says only that it is a branch.
Comparing
- The drawer
- Branches in the Project menu, the phone's Menu or the command palette opens the drawer that compares them.
- In a branch
- It names the original, with a link to it, and lists what the branch has added, deleted or changed since it was taken.
- In the original
- It lists the branches you can open. Pick one to see what it changed, thing by thing, a wall counted together with its corners.
- In this project
- A row the original already matches.
- Also changed here
- Something the original changed its own way since the branch was taken. Taking it overwrites that.
Taking changes back
- Take
- Someone who can edit the original ticks the rows they want and presses Take. It is one edit, which Undo takes back.
- What comes along
- Whatever a taken row needs that the original lacks, such as the stand a light hangs on or the wall a door sits in.
- Checks
- Worked out on a copy first. It names and asks if it would overwrite a change made here, leave a chosen change unable to stand, or change something nobody chose, such as a room whose wall the branch split.
- Before taking
- Every take first saves the project as it stood, as a version named Before taking from the branch, so Versions and history can put it back long after Undo has forgotten it.
- Lost start
- If the branch's starting version has been deleted, every difference from the original shows as a change the branch made, and taking one may undo newer work here.