User guide

New to the app? Start with the Beginner tutorials for step-by-step projects, screenshots, and editable checkpoints.

PiVo Plate is a desktop-first tile-to-3D modeling editor. This is a functioning modeling MVP. The Shortcuts button in the app contains the complete active shortcut list.

First workflow

1. Start — the original sample room opens by default. File → New (demo tileset) starts an empty scene with an atlas; New (empty) has no atlas.
2. Pick a tile — in the Atlas tab, wheel zooms the sheet, middle-drag pans, and dragging a rectangle chooses multiple cells.
3. Choose a construction plane — use Props or the viewport chips to pick XZ ground / XY wall / YZ wall and lock it. Crosshair XYZ inputs place the plane precisely.
4. Draw — left-click/drag draws a tile stroke. B enables left-drag erasing; D returns to drawing. Shift+right-drag also erases in Draw mode. Release commits one undo step; Escape cancels. Plain right-click erases one face; middle-drag orbits, plain right-drag pans, wheel zooms.
5. Select — Tab toggles Draw/Edit. Click to select a face; Shift adds; drag a box to select. Enable vertex mode to pick corners.
6. Transform & texture — Props offers gizmos, numeric transforms, reverse faces and UV rotate/flip/offset controls. Choose an atlas region, select faces, then use Edit → Apply Brush or the Atlas panel's Apply Brush button to reassign their texture/UVs in one undoable step.
7. Organize — Scene → Group selected organizes selected faces. Choose a parent, rename by double-clicking, and use eye/lock controls. Grouping never changes world coordinates.
8. Save & export — Ctrl/Cmd+S downloads a .pvp project. File → Open reloads it. GLB/OBJ exports are also in File. Browser recovery is optional and is not a substitute for downloadable backups.

Editing tools

• Draw mode — tile strokes on construction planes with snapping; undoable drag erase (B + left-drag or Shift+right-drag) with cancellation on unsafe context changes; the HUD shows measured FPS/frame-time states (warming/paused/unavailable) and is not a GPU benchmark.
• Edit mode — face/corner selection, box selection, independent corner editing, numeric and gizmo move/rotate/scale, duplicate, delete, clipboard, reverse winding — all with atomic undo/redo and semantic dirty state.
• Atlas — pan/zoom, cell/rectangular region picking, tile metrics, brush rotation and flips, brush validation against the atlas, and undoable Apply Brush on existing faces.
• Scene — objects, selected-face grouping, reparenting, inherited visibility/locking, renaming and confirmed deletion.

Cameras

Perspective and orthographic cameras are available. Navigation: middle-drag orbits, plain right-drag pans, wheel zooms.

Themes & typography

• Light/dark appearance via the header sun/moon button or View menu, with safe local preference persistence and matching viewport overlays (see THEMES.md).
• Outfit variable font for main UI text; monospace is retained for technical values and HUD readouts (see TYPOGRAPHY.md).
• Lucide icons throughout toolbar, scene controls, menus, tabs and help — no icon CDN.