Move Shapes to Exact Locations with Guidelines or Move Tool

In this quick tip, we look at two different techniques that you can use to move shapes accurately using guidelines or the move tool. This works in Vectric Aspire, VCarve, and Cut2D.

Want to learn more??

Click the link below to take your Vectric skills to the next level!

Learn More

Video Transcript:

Hey, everyone. I had a quick question from one of my students, and she wants to know how to accurately move these circles to a certain location. So I figured I'd make this quick video to help others out as well.

So as you could see, she wants this first circle down here to be three and three quarters from this top one. But she also wants it centered of the triangle. And then the next one down, she wants five inches down and that one center of the triangle as well.

So I'm going to show you a couple of different options you can use for this. The first option you can use is to zoom in on this first circle here and click up in the ruler in the top. And you can drag down a guideline and snap it right to the center of that circle.

Now, if we zoom out, you can right click on this guideline that'll bring up the guide properties. And then down at the bottom here, you can do create a new parallel guide. So if you do relative to guide, and we'll do one.

And we can select the new guide, so as it creates a new one, it'll select that one to be able to offset from that one as well. So this first one, we want three and three quarters down. And since we're going down, we want to go in the negative direction.

So our position or offset is going to be negative 3.75. Click create new guides and you'll see that it'll create a new guideline down here at the bottom. Now, since we had this checked for selecting the new guide, this guide is now selected.

So now we can type in negative five inches. Click create new guide and that will create a guide five inches below that one. Now we can click close. And next, all we have to do is zoom in to this top one again.

We can drag in a guideline from the left ruler and snap that to the center line. And now we have exact locations where these circles want to be. So now we just have to double click on these circles, select that center point and snap it to the intersection of the guidelines and do the same thing down here and

there we go. So you can see that's not too difficult. So I'm going to hide these guidelines by clicking this top corner button on the ruler, and I'm going to undo those moves. I'll show you one other option you can do. So instead of using guidelines, we could actually take this circle that we want to move.

Select that first, hold our shift key, select the top circle that we want to reference from. And then click the center objects button, and that will center that circle on top of the other one. Now we just select the circle that we want to move, which was that bigger circle and we can go to our move tool

and we can go into a relative position. And we want to go three and three quarters down. So that would be in the Y position. And once again will be negative 3.75. Click apply. And there's our new position. Now we can do that same thing.

So we're going to close this, select the circle down here that we want to move. Hold our shift key, select the circle that we want to reference from. Center those together. And now those are the same size. So it's going to look like there's only one there, but there's actually two on top of each other.

So I just want to click at once to select one of those. Go back to our move tool. And the same thing. We're going to go in a relative position and in the y direction we're going to go negative

five. Click Apply. And there we go. That's our new location, and you'll see if we turn back on our guidelines. They're in the exact location, as we did with the guidelines. So there's two different techniques you can use to accurately move a shape to the certain location that you want it.

So let me know in the comments below if that helped you guys out.