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Unity 3 Feature Preview - Snapping & Marquee Selection

April 23, 2010 in Technology | 2 min. read
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Hello Unity Developers!

Incredibly, it's already been more than 3 months since I joined this crew of nuclear-powered toaster engineers and I couldn't be happier to have this be my first blog to share with you all.

Almost unbelievably, the last time we shipped a major version update to Unity, it was with fewer than 10 people on board.  For Unity 3, there are now 65 people working to achieve the same vision of Author Once, Deploy Anywhere.  It's a lofty dream, but we're pleased with the our progress so far and we're driven on by wanting to see what you, the Unity community, will create next.

In the video below, we see how the new improvements to snapping and the addition of marquee selection can really speed up workflows.  Unity 3 now supports snapping the vertex pivot point of one object to a vertex in another object as well as snapping the default pivot point of one object to the vertex in another object.  Also shown is surface snapping, a  feature currently present in Unity 2.x.  Working on conjunction with the new vertex snapping features, assembling levels from component assets can go very quickly.   And it's fun!

Finally, you can now use marquee selection to highlight multiple objects in the scene view by drawing a Rect around their Bounding Box.  The object highlighting is interactive while drawing your Rect, so you'll know exactly what you're selecting when using this feature.  You can also do this multiple times with boolean operations by using Command-Drag to remove from current selection and Shift-Drag to add to to current selection.

Without further ado then, watch and enjoy!

Snapping (GameSetup Scene in Project)
Vertex snapping
Snapping the vertex pivot point of one object to a vertex in another object.
Snapping the default Pivot point of one object to the vertex in another object.
Explaining why this makes it so much easier to create your levels inside of Unity.
Surface Snapping (not new in 3.0)
When dragging a prefab from the Project View into the Scene View it will automatically snap to surfaces.
Showing how Surface and Vertex Snapping can be used in combination for fast level layout.
Marquee Selection (GameSetup Scene in Project)
Selecting multiple Objects by drawing a Rect around their Bounding Box.
Interactive Object Highlighting while using Marquee Selection.
Boolean Operations with Marquee Selection... Command-Drag to remove from current selection, Shift-Drag to add to to current selection.

We plan to be sharing new features from the development of Unity 3 with you regularly, so stay tuned for more.  We're just getting started!

April 23, 2010 in Technology | 2 min. read

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