Editing Workflow

Vertex Linking

There are three link buttons. Along each polar dimension, the respective link button toggles the entanglement of cube vertices spanning that dimension.

Enable the button if want to move vertices along that dimension in unison, and disable the button if you would like to move them independently.

Prime Dimensions

The x-axis of the Time Surface and Spectrum Filter is time, by default.

To see and edit how the waveshape / spectrum / envelope varies with respect to frequency, at a particular time, one may change the dimension of the x-axis to key. Similarly one may change the axis to mod to show the variation along the modulation range, at a particular time and frequency.

The Envelope panel shows the 2D envelope when time is the primary dimension, but otherwise shows the 3D editor.

Tools

Selector

The default tool. The selector is able to select vertices individually, box select, and do common transformations on the selected.

Single vertex selection is done by right clicking near the associated intercept. To add or remove a single vertex to the current selection, hold shift and right click near the intercept of interest.

Box selection is done by holding shift and left-dragging with the mouse over the area of interest. Box-selecting again will add to the total selection.

You can box-deselect by holding ctrl-shift and left-dragging over the area of interest. To deselect all vertices, hit the 'a' key.

When you select an intercept or line intercept, it finds the closest vertex according to the View Position, and selects that, not the intercept itself.

Pencil

The pencil tool draws freehand paths. It has two modes: the first adds vertices by left dragging; the second snaps existing intercepts to the path by right dragging.

The pencil tool is only applicable in 2D editing panels.

The amount of mouse smoothing to the freehand tool can be adjusted with the mouse scroll wheel.

Axe

The axe tool is used to chop lines in polar editing panels. This tool functions to design more complex intercept paths when they need to be dynamic, rather than static like deformer paths. Additionally, for dimensions along which deformers are not assignable (key and mod), more complex paths must be made with the axe tool.

The size of the axe is changed with the scroll wheel.

Using the axe increases topological complexity and marginally increases CPU cost per voice, so if the paths do not need to be dynamic, use a deformer instead.

Editing operations

Scale

The selector tool stretches selected vertices by left-dragging the corners of the selection box.

Holding down the ctrl key (command on Mac) changes the pivot to the center of the selection.

Delete

The delete action deletes the currently selected vertices. If the vertices are children of a vertex cube, it deletes the cube as well, along with the rest of the cube's child vertices.

A vertex may be the child of at most two cubes, and deleting the vertex will delete only the first cube it was 'adopted' by.

Chop

The axe chop operation cuts a vertex cube into two at the point of action.

This may be done along any polar dimension: time, key, or modulation. To chop a vertex cube along the key scale, you must first select key as the Prime Dimension.

Extrude

This action duplicates the vertices, shifts them slightly toward the mouse cursor, and connects the duplicates to the originally selected vertices.

Extrusion is applicable only to polar editing panels (Time Surface, Spectrum Filter, and 3D Envelope).