Edit mode

Edit mode lets you change a piece by hand, right on the stage. Click something in a 3D piece to pick it, then drag its handles to move, turn or scale it, hide it, give it another colour or one of your images as its texture. In any piece that writes words, you can write other words over them.

It's the quick way to nudge a planet, tidy a composition, put your logo on a box or fix a headline, without asking Perlin and without spending tokens.

Switching it on or off

Click Edit on the bar under the stage (the pointer with a click), or press E. The stage shows Editing at the top left, and the Edit panel takes the place of Parameters. Press E again, click the cross on the panel, or press Esc with nothing picked to finish.

The piece pauses while you edit, so things hold still to be placed. Press Space to watch it play with your changes, and again to pause. When you finish, it plays again if it was playing before, unless you played or paused it yourself in the meantime.

Edit mode closes by itself when you send Perlin a message or present the piece. It isn't there for shader pieces, which have nothing to pick (their look is all in their parameters), or on a phone.

Picking something

Move the pointer over a 3D piece and what's under it gets a faint outline. Click to pick it: it gets a yellow box and handles, and the panel shows what it is.

• Dragging where nothing is still turns, pans or zooms the view, if the piece lets you do that, and a click there lets go.
• What the view is inside, and thin things. A sky, a ground that runs to the horizon, an orbit line or a star field is picked by a click rather than a press, so you can still drag across it to turn the view.
• Groups. The line above the fields names what the thing sits inside, from Scene down: a model, a cluster, a ring of planets. Click one to pick it instead, and moving it moves everything in it.

Press Esc to let go of what's picked.

Moving, rotating and scaling

The row of buttons under the panel's heading picks the handles. Each key works from anywhere in the studio while you edit, including after you've clicked into the piece.

Hold Shift while you drag to snap: turns go in 15° steps, scales in tenths and moves in round steps that suit how far away it is. The globe button lines the move and rotate handles up with the scene, or with the thing itself.

For exact values, type into Position, Rotation and Scale. They're where the thing is inside what holds it, rotation in degrees. Press Enter to set a value, or the up and down arrows to nudge it (hold Shift for ten steps).

Hiding, colour and texture

• Showing hides the thing, and shows it again. A thing you've hidden can still be picked where it was, to show it again.
• Colour sets its colour. The curved arrow beside it gives its own colour back.
• Texture says what it shows: nothing, an image, a video or a picture the piece draws itself. Click Swap to choose another from the images in your asset library (signed in) and the ones the piece already uses. The curved arrow gives its own texture back.

A new image starts the piece again, to load it, and Edit mode carries on with the same thing picked. Some things share their look with others: the panel says so, and a colour or texture you give one of them goes on all of them.

Changing words

The Text list in the panel holds the words the piece shows: titles, labels, numbers, the letters of 3D text. Click into one, write what should show instead and press Enter. The curved arrow beside it puts the original back. All shows the whole list when it's long.

In a 2D piece, click words in the piece itself to pick them. Words on a picked 3D thing (a sign, a label) are listed under On it.

Words the piece draws as it goes change straight away. Words it draws once, when it starts (3D text, a label painted on a texture), change when the piece starts again, which happens by itself.

Undoing changes

• Place puts the picked thing back where the code puts it, and keeps its other changes.
• Reset undoes everything done to the picked thing.
• Undo every edit, the curved arrow at the top of the panel, puts the whole piece back as its code has it. The number beside Edit says how many things and words you've changed.

A yellow dot beside a name means it has changes.

Where your changes are kept

Your changes are saved with the version on stage, as your parameter settings are, not as a new version. They go wherever the piece goes: shares, embeds, downloads, wallpapers and rendered video all show them, and the handles never appear in any of them.

When Perlin changes the piece, it keeps your changes, so ask it for something else and carry on. A rewrite of the piece from scratch starts without them. To make them part of the code itself, ask Perlin to "build my edits into the code".

Related

• Tuning with parameters
• Versions and history
• Using assets in a piece
• Text, image and video layers
• Keyboard shortcuts