The Ultimate Guide to SNAPPING in Unreal Engine! (Place Objects Quickly and Accurately)

what's up guys justin here with the realtimeessentials.com so in today's video we're going to talk about how to use the snapping options in unreal engine to quickly place objects let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so we're going to start by talking about the different grid and rotational snapping options that you can use in order to make objects snap stick around till the end because we're going to talk about a way to quickly change the pivot point to a vertex and then use the vertices to kind of lock together inside of unreal engine so first off though let's talk about some of the snapping options that are over here inside of your viewport so the first thing we want to talk about is the grid snapping right here so what the grid snapping is going to do is that's going to allow you to generate a grid inside of unreal engine and then set this so that this snaps to the grid and you can't really see it right here so let's go ahead and let's click on this drop down right here and let's set this to something like 100 so notice how when i set that to 100 i get a grid in here that i can now see inside of unreal engine and so notice how now when i click and drag this this is moving in kind of like more clunky implements or increments and it feels clunky it's not actually clunky but what it's doing is it's actually moving in increments of 100 so what we've done is we've set this so that this is going to snap to certain distances and so what we can do with this is we could set this to something like 50 as well notice how we're going to get more precision in here because the grid that this is snapping to is going to be smaller by the way if this isn't working just click on this button right here in order to enable this so where this is really valuable is you can use this in order to set um how objects move so that they just kind of like automatically snap together so let's say for example that we were to take this object i'm going to hold the alt key and click and drag right here so we're going to create a copy so notice how if i move this around because these are both on the same grid snap settings like this notice how these objects are going to snap together right because these are only moving on that increment where if i was to set this on something like one and then i was to move this around like notice how you don't really get a snap in there because you have so much control over the movement that it's not going to necessarily unless you place this right on the right location it's not necessarily going to put these together without any kind of gap so a lot of the time what we're going to do is we're just going to use that same grid for multiple different uh objects right so if i click and drag this like this notice how those are going to more easily kind of snap together you could do the same thing with walls so let's say i had a wall right here that i dragged into my scene and then i was to make a copy of that again notice how because you're on the same grid snapping settings it's really easy to um set these so that they kind of butt up against each other one thing that i find helpful if i am doing something like this wall for example with multiple parts and pieces so um let's go ahead and let's use some 400 by 400s instead but let's say i was to drag a 400 by let's say i was to drag a 400 by 400 wall piece in here and then another 400 by 400 wall piece right here and so notice how i brought these both in here and they're both snapping to that grid well what that means is that means that i can quickly put these together a lot of the time what i like to do if i'm doing something linear is just to jump into a top view like this then i can hold the alt key and because the snapping is set up with the proper distances like this that means i can really easily add different wall pieces in here that are going to align so going to your top down view is going to give you a good view of what these look like from an alignment perspective and so real quick let's take a quick look at some of the other grid snap values so i'm going to go back into my perspective right here so we've talked a little bit about the grid snap value like this but let's take a look at the rotational grid snap so let's say we brought in an object and we'll just use one of the built-in props so let's go ahead and let's use the we'll use this chair right here so right now if i was to toggle this off and then i was to put this in rotational mode right i'm going to turn grid snapping off for a second but let's say i was to tap the e key and put this in rotational mode notice how i can rotate this to whatever number that i want like i really have basically a hundred percent control over the direction that these are facing and that can be good but sometimes you don't want that much control sometimes you want to limit this so these are only snapping to a certain number of degrees and so what you can do is you can click on this button right here in order to set that and notice how you can set the number of degrees that are in here like this so what that's going to do is that's going to give you control over that rotation so now if i click and drag notice how this is only going to rotate to increments of 45 degrees right here so you can also use that for divisions of 360. so if i was to set this on 5.625 for example then it's going to snap to the 5.625 values and so sometimes what people will use that for is you can hold the alt key and that's going to allow you to create copies in here of objects and so really that's only going to work if you set your object pivot point off of your object right so if i go back into uh move mode and so let's say i hold the alt key and the middle mouse button and drag this off and so one thing i want to make sure that i do is i want to make sure that i right click on this and i set this as my pivot offset so that this is kind of a permanent movement otherwise this pivot offset would just move back to this object but if i was to tap the e key and let's go ahead and let's set this to like 22.5 but if i was to hold the alt key what that would do is that would create copies at um increments of 22.5 from the location i have selected right so what you can do is you can use this in order to create these like rotational you can do this you can use this in order to create these like look rotational arrays inside of unreal engine so you can use that snapping in order to do some kind of interesting things there is also a scale snapping which is just going to do the same thing right so when i scale an object so if i tap the r key if i have that selected what that's going to do is that's going to set that on different increments right increments of 0.25 in this case so that's kind of those options but there's some more important things that you need to know that are going to make your life easier in unreal engine so let's say that we were to bring in this couch object right here and i'm going to go ahead and turn off my rotational skin snapping and my grid snapping all of that and i'm just going to move this object so that it's not really on the ground right now so what you could do with none of the snapping on is you could try to like manually align this with the ground i think that's definitely an option but it's a little bit time consuming however there is an option in here if you click this little drop down right here notice how there's an option for surface snapping what surface snapping is going to do is it's going to take your actor and it's going to snap it to any surface or it's going to snap it to a surface that you drag over so if i turn on surface snapping first off notice that if i drag this down this isn't going to snap to my surface if i drag any of these arrows what it's going to do is it's going to snap to a surface if you click and drag the sphere right here so notice how as soon as i do that that is snapping to any surface that you put it over and so what that means is that means you can take objects that are like up in the air or whatever and you can just really quickly snap them to surfaces inside of unreal engine this is a really powerful option now do note that at the bottom there's an option for surface offset and so let's say i was to set my surface offset to 20 right here and then let's kind of zoom in and take a look at this what we've done is we've told this when you do a surface snap you need to offset this up by 20 centimeters so if there's ever something like isn't aligning with your ground you can adjust this value in order to get it to align to the ground inside of unreal engine so that just gives you a little bit more control over your surface and the offset and then one other thing to note is you've also got this option in here for rotate to surface normal and so what that's going to do is that's going to take your object and it's going to adjust the rotation so that it aligns with your surface so let's say for example that i was to have this object kind of like rotated right like this and then i was to try to do the surface snapping well if i don't have rotate to surface normal selected it's going to snap this but the object isn't actually going to align with the surface right so that's a little bit of a problem however if i was to enable the option for rotate to surface normal that is going to automatically rotate your object so that it aligns with the surface so that can be a massive time saver if you have a bunch of objects that have a rotation applied to them and you need to get them to align to a surface really quickly and so one thing that can be really helpful is a lot of the time you actually want the geometry of an object to snap to the geometry of another object right and um so far nothing that we've done really does that it just works with a grid however there is a tool in here where if you hold the v key on your keyboard and then click and drag notice how i'm getting these little um blue points when i click and drag right and so when i do that what that's doing is that's actually snapping the vertices to different points inside of my scene so if i hold the v key like this notice how this is snapping to the different vertices of the geometry on an object right here so it's not using the grid it's actually using the object itself so this can be a massive time saver however one thing you might notice is if you look at this wall right if i hold the v key right now and i move this if i hold the v key right now and i move this notice how it's going to place my wall over the edge the reason it's placing my wall over the edge is because my object pivot point isn't actually set to a vertex it's set to this central point however if you hold the alt v key and then you click and drag your middle mouse button notice how i can actually use this to move my object pivot point to vertices so i can use this in order to set this corner vertex right here then if i hold the v key and drag this i can use it in order to quickly snap to this vertex right here and so let's say that i was to hold the alt key and click and drag right here and then i was to hold the v key and click and drag this back notice how this is going to give me these little blue points in here that i can use for vertex snapping so i can use this in order to quickly create copies in here and then hold the v key in order to align them so i like this better than the grid because it means i don't have to mess with like math and settings and everything like that i can literally just use this in order to create the copies that i need and so let's say for example that i wanted to create a copy like over here for example and we're going to go ahead and we're going to rotate this 90 degrees so probably want to go ahead and turn my vertex or my rotational snapping to at least like 10 degrees or something like that and so what i can do is i can just hold an alt v middle mouse button in order to set this to this point and then i could hold v and i can just drag this in order to get this to uh to inference to this corner point right here so it's just a quick way to use snapping in order to align objects inside of unreal engine so if you have any questions about anything that we talked about leave a comment down below if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below and as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and i will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The RealTime Essentials

Views: 25,197

Keywords: unity, unity software, unity 3d, unity 2020, unity 2021, unreal engine, unreal engine 4, unreal engine snapping, unreal engine snapping tutorial

Id: syBNq0wumkQ

Length: 11min 41sec (701 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 04 2022