When you select an item in the Construct scene, a small cluster of icons fades in around it — T (move), R (rotate), S (scale), plus a dot for any shape-specific dimension. Instead of every handle at once, you pick the one job you want: click an icon (or press T or R) and only that gizmo appears. Click empty space or press Esc to return to the icons; selecting a different object brings the icons back.
The gizmo edits the same transform you see in the item's TRS editors (open them with the TRS button on the item's row), so a drag and a typed value are interchangeable. Every drag is a single undo step.
An icon appears disabled when an expression drives that channel. If the item's rotation is bound to an expression, the R icon dims and stops responding; T and S carry on as normal.
This is not a restriction so much as an honest answer. An expression is re-evaluated every frame, so it rewrites the channel it owns each time — a drag would be overwritten before you let go of the mouse, and the edit would vanish without ever telling you why. The icon says so up front instead.
To get the handles back, clear the expression on that channel and leave a plain number in its place. If you bind an expression while its gizmo is already on screen, the handles disappear straight away rather than lingering and accepting drags that would not survive.
Choose T, then drag one of the three arrows to slide the object along that world axis (red = X, green = Y, blue = Z). The arrows point along the world axes and stay put as the object turns, so "drag right" always moves the object the same way regardless of how it is already rotated.
Choose R. Each rotation ring is a graded arc: hover one and it shows tick marks and degree labels so you can read the angle as you turn. Like the move arrows, the rings are world-fixed — the red / green / blue rings always lie in the fixed world planes and do not tumble along with the object.
Snapping is built into where you drag: near the centre of the ring the angle snaps to 90°, a little further out to 15°, and out beyond the ring it turns freely. So you choose coarse, fine or free snapping just by how far from the centre you hold the cursor — no modifier keys needed.
Because each ring rotates the object about its own fixed world axis, compound rotations stay predictable: after you rotate about one ring, the other two rings still turn the object in their own visible planes.
Rotation is stored as three Euler angles (pitch, yaw, roll), the same values the Rotate transform operator uses. One consequence is worth knowing: when the object points nearly straight up or straight down, the numeric angle readout can jump between equivalent values even though the object itself does not move. This is normal for any Euler-angle readout (it is called gimbal lock) — the object's orientation is always exact; only the way it is split into three numbers is ambiguous there.
Choose S and drag the handle — capped with a solid cube — to scale the object. (Per-axis size handles appear instead for shapes that carry their own dimensions, such as an ellipsoid's radii; reach those from the shape's own dimension dots in the launcher.)
Every item's row has a TRS button. Open it to reveal the numeric Translate / Rotate / Scale editors, which stay in step with the gizmo as you drag. A component you have set keeps showing; untouched ones stay tucked away until you open the TRS button, so the panel stays uncluttered.
Positional snapping is a toggled mode, shared by transform drags and bounding-volume face drags. Three methods propose positions while you drag, and the nearest proposal within reach of the pointer wins:
| Method | Snaps to | Toggle |
|---|---|---|
| Grid | the ground-plane grid, at the spacing you can see | Alt+G |
| Surface | the measured extents of the scene's geometry | Alt+F |
| Round numbers | human-legible values (1, 2, 5 × 10ⁿ) chosen for the current zoom | Alt+N |
Alt+S toggles all snapping at once without forgetting the per-method
choices. The pill in the viewport corner always shows which methods are live,
and during a drag it names what you snapped to (grid 10) — or says the drag
is running free.
The reach is measured in screen pixels, so snapping feels the same zoomed in and zoomed out. The grid step and the reach are configured in the Rendering options' Snapping group, beside the ground-plane settings — the snap grid IS the visible grid, at one spacing.