Today, we want to highlight improvements to Scene View’s Grid and Snap workflows that we are introducing in Unity 6.4.
First, we’ve redesigned the ‘Grid and Snap’ toolbar for more clarity and quicker access. Frequent user feedback indicated that it was hard to understand which snapping mode was active and what the snapping values were. Also, multiple dropdown menus would often need to be navigated in order to find and adjust common settings such as the incremental snap size. The new design aims to make the grid and snapping state readable at a glance while reducing the number of clicks needed for setting changes.
We’ve consolidated what were previously multiple settings dropdown menus into a single ‘Grid and Snap settings’ menu. The new menu is now home to all grid and snapping settings. Users should no longer need to spend time thinking whether ‘grid size’, for example, is a visual or a snapping setting.
Most importantly, we recognized that absolute grid snapping only works well for levels composed of rectangular areas aligned to grid lines. When level elements are rotated (such as angled bridges or pathways), grid snapping loses its usefulness. To address this, we’ve added the ability to give the grid custom position and rotation. You can now transform the grid by sampling a selected scene object, the handle’s position and rotation, or by directly entering the values you need.
To facilitate snapping to rotated grids, a new ‘Grid’ handle rotation option has been added to the ‘Tool Handle Rotation’ dropdown (located in ‘Tool Settings’ toolbar). Using this setting ensures that the tool’s handle rotation is always aligned to the grid’s rotation. Note that if the handle is not aligned with the grid, the snapping behavior will fall back to incremental snapping, as it has done previously.
Additionally, some Unity 6 users reported missing the ability to adjust grid size independently from incremental snap size. Based on the feedback, we’ve restored this functionality in 6.4. Grid size and incremental snap size are two separate settings again, both easily readable and adjustable in the “Grid and Snap” toolbar.
The Scene View’s contextual menu has also been expanded to include a few quality of life improvements for grids. For example, ‘Move to Handle Position’ places the grid at the handle’s location - useful when manipulating non-GameObject objects, such as points. ‘Reset to World’ resets the grid back to world origin position and clears the rotation, etc.
Finally, these new improvements come with a number of shortcuts that you can find in Shortcut Manager’s ‘Grid and Snap’ category.
Happy snapping!
