Auto-orient and Lock to Wall

Most fixtures behave in a "smart" way when you drag them — they rotate to face into the room when their back edge meets a wall, and the wall-locked rough-ins (toilet, tub, shower) stay glued to the nearest wall at a fixed offset. These behaviors are right 95% of the time, but every so often you want to override them: a corner cabinet that shouldn't rotate, an island that you actually do want to spin freely, a toilet rough-in placed mid-room as a reference for a future bump-out.

The entity panel has two per-fixture toggles for that — Auto-orient on wall and Lock to wall. They live on the selected fixture only, so flipping them on one toilet doesn't affect any other toilet.

Per-fixture, not global. There's no Settings → Auto-orient toggle. The default behavior is baked into each fixture type, and the toggles override it per instance. If you want every toilet you place to ignore auto-orient, you flip the toggle on each one individually — by design.

Where the toggles live

Select a fixture, then look at the entity panel — right rail on desktop, property sheet (entity info button) on mobile. Scroll to the Behavior section. It's a small heading with a tune icon, sitting below the type-specific options and above the Delete button at the bottom of the panel.

The section is hidden for fixture types that wouldn't be affected by either toggle:

• No Behavior section: island, closet, chair, dining table, desk, floor drain, plumbing stack, electrical panel, custom, and the ceiling-mounted electrical symbols (ceiling lights, recessed lights, pendants, ceiling fans, smoke detectors, junction boxes). These fixtures don't auto-orient and aren't wall-locked, so there's nothing to toggle off.
• Auto-orient only (no Lock to wall): toilet, vanity, sink, fridge, stove, dishwasher, washer, dryer, cabinet, upper cabinet, corner cabinet, couch, bed, mirror, vanity light, TV, TV stand, bookshelf, sink rough-in, washer rough-in, bar sink rough-in, and the wall-mounted electrical symbols (outlets, switches, sconces, baseboard heater, etc.). These fixtures auto-rotate but aren't wall-locked.
• Both toggles: toilet rough-in, tub rough-in, shower rough-in. These are the wall-locked rough-ins — they auto-orient AND stay glued to a wall by default.
• Lock to wall only: none — the lock toggle only appears on types that also auto-orient.

The list of types that auto-orient by default covers most of the catalogue. If you're not sure whether a specific type does, place one, drag it near a wall, and see whether it rotates — that's the most reliable check.

Auto-orient on wall

What it does (ON): during a drag, when the fixture's back edge gets within snap range of a wall, the fixture rotates so its back faces the wall and its front faces into the room. "Back" is the -Y side of the fixture in its local space — for a toilet, that's the tank; for a vanity, that's the side that wants to be against the wall.

What it does (OFF): the rotation step is skipped. The fixture still snaps its position to the wall edge (snap engine is independent), but the angle you've set stays put. Useful for:

• Fixtures sitting at an angled wall — auto-orient only knows about horizontal and vertical walls, so an angled wall snap leaves the rotation alone anyway. Turn the toggle off if you want to set the angle manually with Rotate 90° / Rotate 45° from the fixture context menu and keep it that way.
• A vanity that has to face an island instead of the closest wall.
• Any custom angle you set with Rotate 90° / Rotate 45° from the context menu — without the toggle off, the next drag near a wall would overwrite it.

There's a helper tooltip on the toggle that flags the angled-walls edge case: auto-orient is a 4-direction model (the back faces up, down, left, or right depending on which wall is hit), so it deliberately skips angled walls. If your fixture is on an angled wall and rotation isn't snapping, that's why — it's not a broken toggle.

Lock to wall

The Lock to wall toggle is only available on the three wall-locked rough-ins: toilet rough-in, tub rough-in, shower rough-in.

What it does (ON, default): during a drag, the rough-in stays glued to the nearest horizontal or vertical wall at the From Wall distance set on the fixture (12" / 304.8 mm for toilet and shower, 14" / 355.6 mm for tub by default). Snap range is effectively unlimited — the rough-in always finds a wall, no matter where you drag it. The "spider" dim lines radiate from the rough-in's centre and tag the back wall + both perpendicular sides.

What it does (OFF): the wall-lock is removed. The rough-in becomes a free-placed marker — it still skips fixture-fixture snap and overlap prevention (rough-ins are always reference markers, not physical objects), but it free-floats wherever you drag it. The spider still radiates from the centre, just no longer guaranteeing one of the legs lands on a back wall.

Why turn it off:

• A toilet rough-in placed in the middle of a future bump-out, where the wall doesn't exist yet.
• A tub rough-in placed at the centre of a tub-deck island instead of locked to a perimeter wall.
• Working in a partial floor plan where the walls aren't drawn yet but the plumbing positions are known.

The From Wall field stays on the entity panel either way — when Lock to wall is off, the field is still editable but the value isn't used during drag.

What happens on placement vs drag

Both toggles affect drag behavior, not the initial drop. When you place a fixture from the Fixtures panel, it lands at the centre of your current view with rotation = 0 and no wall lock applied — the snap engine doesn't run until you start dragging. The first drag is when auto-orient and wall-lock kick in.

For wall-locked rough-ins specifically, this means a freshly-dropped toilet rough-in is sitting in the middle of the canvas at 0 rotation; the moment you drag it toward a wall, it locks on and rotates so its back faces that wall.

Removing the override

Each toggle's value is stored on the fixture itself, so it saves and syncs with the project. To "remove" your override and go back to the type's default behavior, just flip the toggle back to its default position — the entity panel always shows the effective value (override if set, default otherwise), so there's no separate "reset" button.

If you change a fixture's type later (rare — usually you'd delete and re-place), the override stays on the fixture but may become a no-op if the new type doesn't support that toggle.

Tips

• The toggles default to whatever the fixture type natively does. You only need to flip them when you want a deviation from the default behavior — most users will never touch these.
• A common gotcha: a wall-locked rough-in (Lock to wall ON) refuses to stay where you drag it because it's snapping to a different wall than you intended. Flip Lock to wall OFF, position the rough-in by hand, then flip it back ON only if you want it re-locked to the new wall. While OFF, the dim spider still draws — your wall-distance is just no longer enforced during drag.
• Auto-orient on a corner cabinet doesn't use the same 4-direction rotation as other fixtures — corner cabinets have their own left / right orientation logic that watches for two walls forming an actual corner. The toggle still works (turn it off and the corner cabinet stops trying to auto-flip), but the behavior it controls is "detect a corner and set orientation," not "rotate to face the wall."