Paintings are objects that do not belong to a particular file, they are known internally to 3DTop only. Because a painting can be so big that it fills the entire screen you can only use the usual selection-procedures on the frame of the painting. It has the following popup-menu ( right-click on the frame) items:
- Grab this.
A little robot will attach itself to the object. This way you can select(grab)
several object at the same time and do things on all of them at the same time.
- "Un"moveable.
When you select this, the object can not be moved anymore by clicking on it
with the left mouse-button and dragging the object. All other functions remain
working, so you can actually still move the object by grabbing it and moving
the robot, hence the "Un".
- Spinning.
Each object can spin around it's rotation axis by choosing this function. You'll
notice that the mouse-pointer changes its shape into a left/right arrow, this
means that by moving the mouse left or right you change the speed of spinning.
When you are content with the speed you've chosen, press the left-mouse-button
once and the icons keeps spinning with this speed. If you would like to cancel
the whole operation press the right mouse-button once.
- Delete.
This will delete the painting from 3DTop. No warning will be displayed.
You can resize the paintings
by dragging the left or right edge of the frame. You'll notice that the mouse-pointer
disappears and that you change the width and height by dragging with the mouse:
to the left = decrease the width
to the right = increase the width
up = increase the height
down = decrease the height
Moving a painting is only possible by clicking and dragging the top or bottom edge of the frame.
A tip: Bitmaps are internally
stored in OpenGL with a width or height that is a power of 2. So if you have
a bitmap with the size of for example 312 x 260 it is stored with a size of
512 x 512. This is not very effective in terms of memory-usage. It is best to
resize the bitmap to say 256 x 213 and creating the painting with this resized
bitmap, this causes the painting to be stored as a 256 x 256 bitmap.
Power of two is: 2 , 4 , 8 , 16 , 32 , 64 , 128 , 256 , 512 , 1024 , 2048 etc.