Introduction

This article shows you all the tricks that will make your experience with the Design View much easier and smoother.

Design View is meant to be a convenient tool for everyone. Over time, one would find their way around it anyway. But reading this article would probably save you some time to figure stuff out.

The goal of this article is to show you the best practices to modify existing objects in the Map View and adding new elements to it.

Handling the Map View

When you open the Design View of a project, first you see an overall view of the property and its neighboring area in the Map View.

First trick is to use the mouse scroller wheel to zoom in and out in the Map View.

Also drag the map around by left-click + holding on it and moving the mouse. Make sure you are comfortable handling the Map View by using your mouse.

Selecting Existing Elements

Your new project comes preloaded with a number of existing objects such as Existing Roof Footprints, Pools, etc. These elements are generated by our AI. In a sense, they are guesses made by a machine. If you click on them, information about the object appears on the left window.

When you successfully select an element, an orange rectangle appears around the object. This confirms that the object is selected.

This is not the case for objects of type point, such as Plants, Trees, and Point Objects.

Modifying Elements

The machine (AI) creates the initial elements, so it is only natural if you as a designer would want to modify them.

The most important element to modify is the Parcel Boundary. This is the white dashed line that contains and defines the parcel. It is often the case that you would want to make adjustments to this element. Go ahead and click on any part of the boundary lines to select it. If you click again on the lines, while the object is already selected, you enter the edit mode. So in a sense, you need to click twice on an element to enter its edit mode. Please note that this is different from double-clicking. Double-clicking would simply perform a zoom action. To enter the edit mode, you need to click twice on the object (as slow as you wish).

When you are in edit mode of an element, you see each line looking like the image above. Each line will have two orange dots at its ends and one smaller white dot in the middle. It may look simple, but only these three dots give you immense power to modify one simple line and create almost any shape that you wish. Here is a list of what you can do with these dots:

• Left-click + hold the orange dots to drag them around
• Right lick on the orange dots to delete them (if there are too many of them)
• Drag the white dot around to turn the line into two shorter lines

The white dot in the edit mode allows you to create any shape that you want on the Map View. With a little practice, you can master the modification process with these orange and white dots.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Following keyboard shortcuts are activated on the Map View

Delete	Delete selected objects
Esc	Cancel selection / Close massage windows
Ctrl + z	Undo
Ctrl + Shift + z	Redo
Ctrl + s	Save
Ctrl + Arrow Left	Move selected objects left
Ctrl + Arrow Up	Move selected objects up
Ctrl + Arrow Right	Move selected objects right
Ctrl + Arrow Down	Move selected objects down
Shift (hold) + Click	Group select objects

Context Menu

Context menu appears when you right click on an object. This menu is customized base on the layer of the object that you clicked on. However, below is a list of all the actions that may appear in this menu.

Delete	Deletes the object
Duplicate	Creates a copy of the object. The new object is placed slightly to the right side of the original object.
Convert to Sketch	Converts the object to a sketch object. This is useful when you want to use an existing object as an sketch object and add texture to it.
Transform	A wide range of transformations are available from this submenu. These include rotation, mirroring, smoothening and more.