At the top of the tool palette are four tools that affect the working environment. The most important of these is the Selection Arrow tool at the top left. With the default Selection Arrow tool, you can perform many fundamental operations just by clicking and dragging, including move, resize, reshape, and extrude. This selection tool provides you with the 3D crosshair for general manipulation of objects. The other three tools in the top section are Snap-to-handles, the Snap Grid, and Tool Methods.
The creation tools are next in the palette. These are the Single-line, Rectangle, Arc, Circle, Polyline, Text, Block, and Poly-wall tools. You will probably use the Block tool most often. To use any of these tools, select the tool by clicking on its icon, then position the 3D crosshair wherever you want to start drawing, and finally drag or click (depending on the tool) to create an object.
Just below the creation tools are the mark-up Pencil and Eraser. These let you do quick 2D paint-style mark-ups on top of any 3D view.
Opening Tools
Last in the top section of
the palette are the Rectangular Opening and Poly-opening tools, which easily
make openings in blocks and other objects, such as for building windows.
Below the opening tools are the Eye Dropper and Color Picker tools, which are used to copy and adjust the color of objects.
The second chunk of the Tool Palette is organized into left and right columns. On the left are the Rotate, Trim, Reshape, and Faces tools, for editing objects.
On the right side of the second section of the Tool Palette are the default Plan Working Orientation, North/South Elevation Working Orientation, East/West Elevation Working Orientation, and Arbitrary Working Orientation. These icons control the alignment of the 3D crosshair in the modeling space, much like tilting the head on a drafting machine.
At the bottom of the tool palette are the viewing tools. The Eye tool and the Look tool are the main 3D view adjusters. Dragging these tools in the model window lets you move your view around the model, using option-drag for moving inward and outward. In the middle of the viewing tools is the Zoom Percentage tool, showing the percentage of 2D zoom. A click on it restores a normal 100% zoom, useful if you've zoomed way in or out. At the bottom of the viewing tools, Zoom-in and Zoom-out are the 2D view adjusters, allowing you to expand or shrink the display of a model without altering the three-dimensional characteristics of the view. When a view is zoomed in to something greater than 100%, the normal Macintosh scroll bars are active to allow panning.