Here is a file I am working on. I have come a long way, but I need to get some precision here. This is a sidewalk for an O scale railroad layout. It is going to have a cobblestone perimeter on the bottom and left side of the “L”. If you zoom in you will see that I need my rectangular block (layer 17) to be the edge of my polygon.
I have a magic mouse and can’t seem to get my rectangular blocks to line up with the edge of the polygon. Is there a snapping function I can use or a magnetic snapping function I can use? For something this big, I can’t get to the handles of my shapes when zoomed in to make very precise moves and snaps.
If I drop the block on the line of my polygon or “L”, will it burn, and then cut the perimeter? Or do I need to have the edge of each rectangle block on the exact edge of my polygon so I will be cut out and uniform? If you don’t understand ask questions. 3cm sidewalk.lbrn2 (38.3 KB)
#1 Press and hold CTRL while moving objects. That will unlock the snap feature and give you much more precise positioning,
#2 You dont have to grab an object by the handle to move it. Select the object then click and drag anywhere on the object to move it
#3 Yes, you can snap on the vertical or the horizontal - then group objects together (even different layers) and move as a group. I use that a lot - you also are not limited to working on the printable area. If it is getting cluttered, scroll to fresh work space and move/aling/shrink or rotate to your desire.
#4 You can drive objects around on the workspace with the arrow keys. SHIFT+ arrows makes big jumps, CTRL+arrows makes smaller moves
Thanks for the help. I was able to use the control key on my Mac to position my cobblestones. I think I am getting somewhere. What I need to do next is combine my stones around my manhole cover. I don’t know if there is too much going on here, but to make my first burn on this file, I had to make the stones smaller and and some fodder. It really does’t look that good. Someone at my makerspace was able to combine my stones with th manhole cover so it burned the cover and left some space around the stones a few weeks ago. I can’t get a repeat on it. I tried selecting stone and the cover, but the stone were all weird and non-uniform.
1… Do these have to be on the same layer to combine them properly, or is this manhole cover too small to make this happen.
2 Could I combine the outer ring of the manhole cover with the stones and get them to merge? Just a thought, but now sure how to do that yet.
See files and pics. Zoom to the manhole cover and see if you can get it to merge with the cobblestones and tell me how you did it.
Select the man hole - move it to a clear place on the workspace. Isolate the outer ring from the inner two rings and texture. GROUP the inner parts together into one piece.
Grab the cobble stone section that you want to plant the manhole into, move it near the outer ring. Make the cobble stone section into a single unit by using the GROUP command.
Over lay the outer circle onto the cobbles. DUPLICATE the outer circle, set extra copy aside
With outer circle selected, SHIFT+click on the cobbles to multi-select.
Use BOOLEAN tool WELD
to cut the man hole cover shape out of the cobblestone.
Reassemble the pieces. When you have the subassembly in place, GROUP them together to make it easier to move them about without leaving annoyingly small parts behind.
