Placing assets & the scatter brush

There are two ways to place an asset: drop a single instance, or scatter many with the brush. Both draw from the active brush — the asset you loaded by clicking a card in the library shelf or browser. From there the selection and transform tools move, duplicate, and organize what you placed.

Placing a single instance#

Click a shelf card's ＋ overlay (or the Place button in the full-screen browser) to drop one instance near the centre of your current view. Adding several assets this way fans them into nearby open cells instead of stacking every copy at one point. The new instance is grid-snapped when grid snapping is on, and it becomes the selection so you can immediately nudge or transform it.

With the Brush tool active and the scatter density at its default of 1, a viewport click also places exactly one instance — at the snapped cursor point, selected on placement. Selecting an asset and clicking the map never surprise-scatters a cluster at density 1.

The scatter brush#

Pick the Brush tool (B) from the header cluster. A dashed green footprint ring and centre dot follow the cursor across the ground plane. Raise the density above 1 and a click stamps that many placements, sampled inside the footprint radius, each with a random yaw and scale within your limits. The click centre is grid-snapped when snapping is on, but the scatter offsets stay organic. Stamped placements are named <Base>.<nnn> with per-asset counters that survive a reload, and they land on the brush asset's default layer.

One stamp is one undo step — the whole cluster reverts together.

Scatter settings (Brush tab)#

Configure the brush in the inspector's Brush tab, under Scatter Settings:

The Active Brush section above shows the loaded asset, the layer it paints onto, and a Stamp one on map button. With no brush loaded it prompts you to pick a card first.

Eraser mode#

The Brush tab has Paint / Eraser segments. In Eraser mode the footprint turns red and a click removes every visible, unlocked placement inside the radius as one undo step — no active brush required.

Selecting & transforming#

The header segmented cluster is Select / Move / Rotate / Scale / Brush / Road, with Grid and rotation-snap toggles beside it. A gizmo attaches to the primary selection:

• Move — full X/Y/Z (Y is clamped at or above ground).
• Rotate — yaw only.
• Scale — uniform.

Select multiple placements and every unlocked one follows the primary's delta (move translates, rotate orbits about the primary, scale scales offsets about it). During a drag, hold Ctrl to temporarily invert both grid and rotation snapping, or hold Alt at the start of a drag to duplicate the selection and drag the copies. Each gizmo drag commits one undo step on release.

Sliders and numeric fields are different: they write live as you type or drag, and only consecutive edits belonging to the same gesture fold together — one slider drag is one undo step, while separate edits always stay separate steps.

Picking#

• Click a placement to select it; Shift-click toggles it in or out of a multi-selection.
• Shift-drag sweeps a marquee that unions every visible, unlocked placement it crosses.
• Alt-click eyedrops that placement's asset into the active brush.
• Placements on locked layers are click-through and can't be picked.

The Instance tab mirrors the selection with numeric Position X/Y/Z (metres), Rotation Y (degrees), and Scale fields, plus Drop to ground and a reset that keeps position while returning rotation to 0° and scale to 1.

Painting connected roads#

Choose the Road tool in the header or press D, then open the Roads inspector tab. Road tiles are pack-driven — the catalog loads with the pack, so the families and modifiers you see depend on which pack ships road tiles. With no catalog loaded the tab reads "Road tiles load with the pack. Open a pack that ships road tiles to paint a network." You can see the catalog metadata either way, but only tiles available to your account or license can be placed.

• Family chooses the road style, such as a street or dirt family.
• Paint / Erase adds or removes road cells on the map's integer road grid.
• Modifier changes a painted cell to a supported variant, such as a crosswalk, without disconnecting the network.
• Stamp places a supported standalone road detail.
• Refusals explains cells that could not be built, including unavailable tiles or a connection shape the chosen family does not provide.

Connected cells automatically choose straight, corner, junction, and end tiles as the network changes. Resolved tiles appear on a dedicated Roads layer, which is created when you first paint a road. Editing a locked road tile is refused rather than silently replacing it. Road edits, modifiers, stamps, and erases are saved with the map and can be undone.

Keyboard & snapping#

While the map pane is focused and you aren't typing in a field:

• Tools: Q / V select, W move, E rotate, R scale, B brush, D road.
• Esc deselect · Delete / Backspace delete · Cmd/Ctrl+D duplicate · Cmd/Ctrl+C/X/V copy/cut/paste · Cmd/Ctrl+A select all visible unlocked.
• F frames the selection (or resets the view when nothing is selected).
• Arrow keys nudge X/Z by the grid step (¼ m with snap off); PageUp / PageDown nudge Y.

Grid and rotation snap steps default to 1 m and 15° and are editable in the Map tab. Delete, duplicate, and drop-to-ground act on the whole selection; locked placements are skipped.

Next#

• Layers & organization
• Environment & time of day
• Exporting a map