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Rectangle: Directed (tool)A rectangle at any angle from two adjacent corners and a width.
Menu: Draw > Rectangle: Directed | Node: Rectangle: Directed | In depth: Rectangles & squares
Three clicks. The first two are adjacent corners and give the base edge, at whatever angle you like. The third sets how wide the rectangle is.
The third click is not a corner. It is a distance: only how far it sits from the base edge counts, measured at a right angle, so you can click anywhere along the width you want rather than aiming at where a corner should land. Which side of the base edge you click is which side the rectangle goes, so you choose the side here rather than by ordering the first two clicks the way Square makes you.
That third click leaves something behind: a handle at the middle of the far edge. It is a point you can drag, and it is what makes this rectangle editable rather than fixed.
The two drivers pull in different directions, which is the useful part.
- Drag the handle and the far edge follows it. The rectangle gets deeper or shallower, and the base edge does not move.
- Drag a base corner and the base edge changes. The width you set is kept, measured from the handle, so the rectangle turns or stretches along its base while staying the same depth.
Between them you can adjust either dimension on its own after the fact, which is what an aligned rectangle cannot do once it is drawn at an angle, since it has no angle to keep.
The result is a group holding four segments, the far corners, and the handle. It is an outline: fill is opt-in, so make a Region from the edges when you want an area.
The two corners you clicked are a special case worth knowing. If the tool made them, the group owns them and they go when the rectangle goes. If you clicked corners that already existed, they are not the rectangle's to own, and deleting the rectangle leaves them exactly where they were with whatever else was built on them intact.
< Previous: Rectangle: XY-Aligned | Next: Square >
- In the node graph: Rectangle: Directed - build the same rectangle as a node.
- Rectangles & squares: the three ways to a four-sided figure, and which to pick.
- Square: the same idea with the width fixed to the base edge's length.