When designing a city, I want to ensure that the buildings are aligned perfectly by moving them one tile at a time. Could you explain the best tools or settings to use to achieve precise building placement without misalignment?
If your allowing players to build, then its best to align to the build grid.
Sometimes props don’t move the way you want them to and snap into places you don’t want, in which case turn off Editor Cell Snap in World Settings.
the standard wall is 512 units wide and 384 units high.
I did create a spreadsheet of widths and height multiples of these numbers for reference.
eg floor heights 0, +/- 384, +/- 768, +/- 1152 etc etc
wall centres 0, 512, 1024, 1536, 2048 etc etc
i usually just set my grid snap to 128, 4 moves for a normal piece and 2 moves for a half piece along X/Y distance, and 3 moves for Z height.
To get a location for build grid in a new area, set the grid snap to 512, move the prop to 0,0 and then drag it back to where you want it
But this assumes the prop has a central pivot point, there may be some with corner pivot.
check the transforms of prefab pieces, they often have rotations that are not quite whole degrees and when moved, the locations become not quite right if your into precision and integers…like I am
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Is it because the scale snap is different that it shifts a little when zoomed in or rotated?
Sometimes it’s not all that clean when you match the 514 values
Yeah, going off the different transforms, there is a discrepancy, a few factors here and there seem to add up to a precision error. I used to design roof & wall frames for a manufacturing plant and subtle errors always added up the further you get from the starting point.
World snap is cleaner, local space snap can go wild, once you start using angles other than right angles, the transforms become a bit not clean by the restraints to decimal precision.
I haven’t used the scale snap option, I’ve been manually doing it from a spreadsheet table.
Heres my cheatsheet
You can use a power of 2 size and multiply it with a “half of half of 1” scale value and the size reduction comes out in nice neat increments. This scale table scales a 1024 cube in increments of 32.
Its actually quite mathemagical how they work together.
But things like scaling an object with a central pivot point then you got the left and right to deal with from the centre so to make it flush with one side you have to move it half the distance of the difference, then these little halfs get lost in the floating points.
I like to manually put in rotation as well, if I do use the gizmo, I try not to rotate more than 90 degrees with it, it often creates more complex XYZ values than needed
Then you have to worry about the building pieces being used, some are made and fit perfectly or have well thought out edges that fit well with each other. Some are a bit rough…
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