Clicker

engon's clicker is a tool to easily populate your scene with assets. Select objects in your scene, enable clicker with the Click Assets button in the Clicker sub-panel and place objects directly under your cursor.

Keyboard shortcut is Alt+C

Select multiple objects and press Alt+C to start clicking without accessing the panel. Keyboard shortcut can be changed in engon preferences (Preferences -> Add-ons -> Object: engon -> Keymaps -> Clicker)

Overview

By clicking Click Assets button while having at least one object selected engon enters the clicking mode. In this mode an overlay with controls is displayed and you will see the current clicked object under your cursor. Press mouse Left Button to place the asset. Press Esc to end the clicker session. More advanced controls like adjusting scale, rotation and randomizing assets of clicked assets are described in the Controls section.

Clicker uses Instanced Collections

Clicker automatically creates instance collections out of the selected objects. This makes the workflow easier as everything is wrapped under an empty and more optimized as the whole geometry is instanced.

Clicker automatically aligns origins to the bottom

The best clicking experience is when the origin is at the bottom of the object. Clicker does this automatically when Align Origin to Bottom is toggled. This affects only the clicked objects, not your scene. If the origin alignment isn't as desired, you can toggle this option off and adjust the origin manually.

Clicking multiple objects as one object

To click multiple objects at once, parent them to an empty object. Clicker will automatically figure out that this is one object.

Use UNDO to remove last clicked assets

Clicker supports the Blender undo stack. Each clicker session is considered as one undo step.

Controls

When in the clicker mode, the following controls are available. Overlay describing clicker controls is displayed in your 3D viewport.

Control	Description
Left Button	Place object at the cursor position. Releasing the button finalizes the object placement.
← Left Button →	Hold and drag the mouse button after placing the object to rotate it.
← Left Button+Alt →	Hold and drag the mouse while holding Alt after placing the object to scale it.
Ctrl	Hold to align the object to the normal of the surface under cursor. You can also toggle this in the Panel Controls.
R	Get random object from the selection. This is random and the same object might be randomly selected again. Press multiple times to get another object.
Esc	Exit the clicking mode.

Currently these keys are not customizable

Let us know if you would like us to make the clicker key bindings customizable.

Panel controls

Output collection

Select a collection where the newly created instances of clicked objects will be placed. By default objects will be added to a Clicker collection.

Surface collection

Clicker will use all objects in this collection to check for collision and place the currently clicked object on the surface of the object under the cursor. If nothing is specified the whole Scene Collection is considered.

Select specific collection to gain performance

While working with large scenes, the clicker has to check each object's surface, which can cost a lot of computing power. Use a more specific collection containing a subset of the scene objects for significant performance gains.

Limit where objects are placed

You can use the Surface Collection to specify e. g. Ground collection containing the ground objects in your scene, to always click objects on the ground only.

Randomization

Option	Description
Random Rotation Z	Randomize rotation around the object's local Z axis. 0 is no rotation, 1 is a random number from <-180, 180> degrees.
Random Tilt	Random XY rotation around the object's local axis. 0 is no rotation, 1 is a random number from <-90, 90> for individual axis.
Random Scale	Additional random scale of the clicked object. 0 keeps the original scale, other values are added to scale of all axis at once and selected from <-value, value>. Z-axis is soft limited to 0 to not flip objects.

Options affect only the next clicked object

You can adjust the options on the fly in the panel, but they will take effect on the next clicked object. The current object under your cursor won't be affected by the changes.