Creating a copy and moving it with Gumball

Rhino Rhino for Windows
1

Hello everyone,

I’ve got an object and I want to move a copy of it 42". I tried copy/ paste (in place) and then with gumball I move it 42" but is there a way to skip the copy/paste? --Because it takes quite a while for paste to happen. Is there a way to do it with gumball?

Thank you.

2

There are two tools you should learn right now that are going to help you a lot. First is the Shift/Ortho mode. Ortho means you can only do movements along specified angles (default is every 90 degress but you can make it anything you want with the OrthoAngle command). You activate Ortho either by clicking on the ortho button at the bottom of the window, or by holding shift while move the cursor. The second tool is the TAB direction lock. When you are moving an object in the context of a command, you can hit the TAB key to lock the direction you’re moving in between the starting point and the current cursor location. Try these, they’ll make more sense than me explaining them.

To Copy:

Select the object you’re copying, type “Copy” to activate the copy command. Now choose a point as your starting point, then hold shift (if you want to move horizontally or vertically) and move the cursor till its pointing in the direction you want. Hit TAB and then type 42 and hit SPACE or ENTER (these do the same thing in Rhino)

Gumballs are great for some things but i find using the commands is quicker for most of my purposes, particularly where i need to transform an object using another object as a reference. In this case they’re probably about the same

Edit: There is a fundamental difference between the copying/pasting from the windows clipboard (Ctrl+C/Ctrl+P) and the rhino copy command. The first is typically used to copy a piece of geometry over to another open Rhino Document, while the second is better for duplicating geometry within a document

3

Yes. Alt with Gumball will make a copy.

Either:

Click on an arrow with Alt held down then type the value in the box - it will make a copy and move it that value

or,

Start dragging and hit Alt once to see the little “+” sign show up - then drop the copy where you want. Sometimes you have to hit Alt a few times to see the “+” sign - Rhin “bug”…

HTH, --Mitch

3 Likes
4

Start dragging the selection via the Gumball. Then type 42 and press enter to limit the distance. At this point tap the Alt key and you’ll see a + symbol indicating that a copy will be made after placing the selection.

Here’s a video that might help too

5

Thank you all. This is perfect.

6

@defterGoose

Regarding your last paragraph, I’m trying to find the rhino copy command. On the edit menu copy and paste have Ctl+ C and Ctl+P assigned to them, which is the shortcut for copying/pasting from the windows clipboard.
Any thoughts?

7

It’s just Copy. (Not CopyToClipboard). You can:

Type it at the command line
Select it from the Transform (not Edit) menu
Grab the icon that looks like this

from the toolbar on the left side

–Mitch

8

Thank you @Helvetosaur. That’s very interesting. I had no idea it was there or that there was a difference!