The Assembly Pane adds the ability to organise surfaces into groups (or: “assemblies”) and a quick access to surface related commands and settings such as visibility, locking and trimming through a right click menu. Grouping surfaces enables you to change the settings for several surfaces with one right click action.

The Assembly Pane in Maxsurf can be in different states:

§   Floating

§   Docked

§   Pinned – Auto Hide

§   Hidden

 View a video on the web that will show you the different window options for the Assembly Pane.

Also see Tool Panes – Video.

The Assembly Pane may be brought to the front by selecting View | Assembly Pane, pressing F2, or using the  button on the view toolbar.

The Assembly Pane contains a tree view of the surface hierarchy. This pane can be docked into the application window, or floating above it.

To dock a floating Assembly Pane, simply left click on the top window border and drag it onto any of the stickers that appear.

Drag the Assembly Pane onto the sticker to dock it.

When the Assembly Pane is docked, this process can easily be reversed to switch back to a Floating Assembly Pane. Simply select the top border of the docked window and drag it to any location on the screen.

Tip: when the Assembly Pane is docked, you can use the “Tile Horizontal” or “Tile Vertical” commands from the Windows menu to automatically fill the rest of the window with your favourite working windows.

You can change the Assembly Pane from Docked to Pinned or Auto Hide and visa versa by clicking on the Pin icon on the top right of the window.

When the Assembly Pane is in the Auto Hide state, it will automatically hide itself to the outside of the screen if it is not being used. To show the dialog again, simply move your mouse cursor over the bar on the side of the screen (or click on it) and it will appear.

The tree view has full support for inline editing, so names of assemblies and surfaces can be changed easily simply by slowly clicking twice on the name. Surfaces properties can also be edited by double clicking on the name, which then brings up the Surface Properties dialog box. You can also right-click on any item in the tree to modify it via context sensitive menus. Further, a surface’s properties may be edited by double clicking on the surface name in the Assembly Pane.

You can move a surface into an assembly by dragging and dropping the surface icon in the tree onto the assembly. You can move an assembly into another assembly in the same way.

You can repeat this process as required to create any arrangement of assemblies you may require.

Right clicking on an item in the tree view brings up a menu with commands for that item.

For surfaces this context sensitive menu contains:

Assembly Pane – Context Sensitive Menu for Surfaces

For assemblies this context sensitive menu contains:

Icons are used next to each item to show its current state – i.e. unlocked/locked, visible/hidden, and also for assemblies, i.e. collapsed/expanded. Icons allow you to see at a glance what state a surface is in at any time. The tick icon indicates that the surface is visible; the padlock icon indicates that the surface is locked.

Also see: Properties Pane.