Guides

Guides are for the eye. They stay out of the composite, out of every export and out of the undo history. Like notes, they stay on screen while you use every other tool, so you paint against them.

Option bar

• +X - Adds a horizontal guide, running the full width of the viewport. It shows the guides if they were hidden, and arms Edit mode.
• Edit - Turns on moving and removing. The word turns cyan and takes an underline while it is on, so it reads as on even for someone whose accent color is already cyan.
• Y+ - Adds a vertical guide, running the full height of the viewport.
• Clear All - Removes every guide in the scene. It acts at once, and one press of +X puts a guide back.
• Count - Reads "No guides", "1 guide" or "N guides".

The viewport plus button

The leftmost button in the viewport's fab row shows and hides the guide lines whatever tool is selected, so you can take a clean look at the model without changing tools and changing back. Hidden guides are kept. Shift+click it to show the lines and pick up the Guides tool in one gesture.

Moving and removing

• Drag a guide - Moves it, but only while Edit mode is on. Outside Edit mode the lines stay out of the way, so a brush stroke passes straight through them.
• Alt+click a guide - Removes it. The alt check runs before the drag starts, so an alt press can never also nudge the line it is deleting.
• Drag a guide off the side - Removes it.
• Clear All - Removes all of them.

All three removal gestures give the same single red flash on the way out.

Notes

• The list of guides is saved with the project. Whether they are shown is a preference of yours, off by default, so opening a project never changes the viewport chrome and clearing a scene never changes the button.
• Adding a guide while guides are hidden shows them first, so a line never lands in a list nobody can see.
• Leaving the tool always leaves Edit mode.