About the Perspective Tool Modes

When drawing on vector layers, selecting the Perspective tool displays its properties and options in the Tool Properties view.

Lasso and Marquee Modes

When selecting artwork, you can use the Lasso mode to make a freehand selection or the Marquee mode to make a rectangular selection.

TIP You can press and hold the Alt key to temporarily switch from the selected mode to the other.

Snapping

Allows you to enable or disable snapping for this tool and all other animation and drawing tools that support snapping, as well as to select which types of snapping are enabled.

If you double-click or long-click on this button, it will open a pop-up menu in which you can toggle different snapping modes. You can also click on this button to toggle it off, which will disable all snapping modes, and click on it again and toggle it on to re-enable the snapping modes which were previously enabled.

This tool supports the following snapping modes:

  • Snap to Contour: When enabled, while moving a selection or one of its control points, it will snap against the nearby points and contours of your artwork, allowing you to snap parts of your artwork together.
  • Snap to Alignment Guides: When enabled, when moving the selection or one of its control points, it will snap against nearby alignment guides—see About Alignment Guides.

  • Snap and Align: When enabled, while moving a selection, the rectangular bounding box of the selection will snap to the rectangular bounding box of any other drawing stroke in the drawing, allowing you to align drawing strokes laterally.

Perspective and Lattice Modes

When using the Perspective tool to deform artwork, you can deform artwork in two distinct ways. The Perspective mode deforms the drawing by simulating a perspective effect, which will make it look like you're rotating a sheet of paper in a 3D space. The Lattice mode simply deforms the artwork to make it fits the shape of the Perspective tool's control box.

The difference between both modes becomes easier to understand if you apply a transformation to a drawing of a grid to make it look like it's laid down on a surface:

As you can see, in perspective mode, the visible distance between the horizontal bars is proportional to how close to the point of view they would be in 3D perspective. In lattice mode, the vertical position of the horizontal bars was merely scaled down to fit the vertical size of the grid.