Locking an object

Description: In this short tutorial, learn how to lock objects on your canvas.


Summary: Lock objects to prevent the frustration of moving them by accident. Begin by selecting the objects you want to lock (0:25), then either select the ‘lock object’ option in the toolbar or right click the object to lock it. Unlock the object by right-clicking and selecting ‘unlock’ (1:22) or unlock all objects on the canvas by selecting the ‘unlock all’ option in the toolbar.


Meet the expert: Shiz Aoki, CEO and co-founder of BioRender, shares her 10+ years of expertise as a distinguished science illustrator to help you bring your science to life - visually.

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Overview

If you've ever felt the frustration of trying to illustrate and select objects, but you keep accidentally picking up the background elements like so, We've got a solution in BioRender called Lock, where you can actually lock down objects, particularly background elements so that you can actually go and select foreground elements without picking up the background.

So I'm gonna zoom in here a little bit for you so you can see. And what I'm gonna wanna do in this case is perhaps lock down this cross section of a nucleus as well as this light sort of cytosol color that I'll probably accidentally pick up if I want to move this section of proteins in the foreground or genes. So what I'm gonna do is select the icon, come up here to the lock object option, or I can actually right click and do the same thing from the right click menu. So I'm gonna go ahead and select lock object. Now this object is no longer movable. In fact, it's actually picking up the object behind that, which is the the side is all color here. So I'm gonna do the same thing for this block of color. Right clicking and locking the object. So now if I try to pick up anything in the foreground, it will only pick up those elements and it will not pick up the nucleus, nor the side is all color. And if you'd like to unlock it, you can manually select the object and you see here the little lock symbol does show up. I can right click and then unlock the object if necessary, if I do wanna move it again. So go ahead and do that. And now it's free to move again. So it's locking and unlocking an object. If I have more than 1 object locked and I can't quite remember what objects on my Canvas are locked and which ones aren't.

You can actually unlock all objects on your Canvas by coming up here to the unlock all option in the toolbar. And that's actually going to unlock all of the locked objects on your canvas all at once. So let me do that now. And you can see that all the objects are now able to be moved. And that's how I would lock objects or unlock objects in BioRender.

Due to continuous improvements in BioRender, the application may appear slightly different in some of our videos.
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