Placement snapping

Hey!

I’ve just installed the new Unity 2.6. One of the features I wanted to try out is the placement snapping, that they brag about. It would really be nice when creating my world.

The problem: how does it work?

I’ve tried to set the pivot point to center, but none the less it doesn’t really seem to snap to anything. What am I doing wrong?

Please help. I would like to get snapping!

Hold down the command key on Mac, or the control key on Windows to snap as you drag an object. You can change the snap grid using Edit > Snap settings.

(By the way, for reference, these keystrokes and others are listed on this page of the manual.)

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I think carnevalle may be referring to the ray snapping alluded to in the “What’s New” page for 2.6 rather than plain 'ol snapping. I thought the key command was (cmd/ctrl)+shift, but that doesn’t seem to work for me.

To snap to surfaces you need to hold down control/shift (Windows) cmd/shift (mac) and drag the middle of the translate gizmo. Also in order to snap to surfaces the surface must have a collider.

If you snap to surface while in pivot mode the object will snap the pivot point of the object to the surface. If in center mode the object will snap the nearest vertices of the selected object to the surface. This is really useful if you want to snap an object into a corner for instance as it will snap to the floor as well as the walls.

It’s a great tool that I can’t live without now :wink:

Ah, so it snaps to vertices. I was trying to test it out using cube primitives and couldn’t figure out why it would only occasionally snap at the edges. Thanks for the clarification on how it’s used!

I love the new snapping trick - is it scriptable at runtime, i.e. instantiate an object while the game is running and snap it to the ground or other object? I know you can do this “manually” with raycasts, but still…

Interestingly enough the support page,lerpz demo, and the book “unity game essentials” state that the snap to collider shortcut is just “ctrl+drag center of gizmo” and well that just doesn’t work

Does the snapping feature work in Unity iPhone also? I can’t find the settings for it anywhere.

It was changed to shift/control in 2.6 for snap to surface… control-drag snaps to grid points. We missed updating the manual in certain places.

There are no snapping features in the iPhone version at this time.

This is one of the most unstable features of 2.6, and it’s a little bizarre that it’s still touted so proudly on the what’s new page. Dropping a few cubes into a scene and trying to arrange them with bounding box snapping is, in a word, frustrating. Watching the box you’re dragging flip out trying to figure out where to go is one thing, but the frequency at which it will choose to simply ignore random bounding boxes makes the feature almost unusable.

Simple test: Make a cube.

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Duplicate it, snap the new cube next to the first one.

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Duplicate again, but snap the new cube to the top of the first one.

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Now try to snap a fourth cube to make a configuration like this:

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Good luck have fun.

Really disappointing guys. I’ve been wanting this feature for a while, but this just won’t do. Look to Wings3D’s “put on” function for inspiration. It doesn’t have to be an interactive drag; it needs to be a rock solid way to move an object into aligned contact with another. As soon as the axes are aligned, normal transform and align tools are fine.