A long time ago I used Unreal quite a bit, but haven’t in recent years. I’ve been watching various tutorials lately for a refresher, and I’ve noticed that nobody gives the “keep the snap-to-grid turned on if you want to save yourself headaches down the road” speech anymore. Is it no longer considered a low grade sin to disable the Snap-To-Grid?
keep the snap-to-grid turned on if you want to save yourself headaches down the road
Huh. Assuming we’re talking about drag-actor snap rather than editor graph snap. Either way, why would that be sinful? Have I been using the editor wrong for the last 7 years?! Isn’t this just a tool one would use depending on the job at hand?
If you make modular content that has to match up, then the grid is a life saver.
If you make BSP/geometry content, where you want to do CSG, then the grid is also helpful, but nobody really does that anymore.
If you’re painting terrains and placing rocks, the grid doesn’t help – you need fine alignment of natural elements.
If you’re using spline-based constructors (roads, fences, etc) that create watertight geometry mathematically, no matter what the spline, then the grid is also not needed.
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But am I crazy though? Wasn’t this something that was taught to young designers back in the early days of the Unreal Tournament Engine? I mean, I suppose I could have imagined it since it was so long ago, but with how much I vividly remember it I honestly don’t know.
When everything was more blocky then that is helpful to make sure things line up. But in the real world things rarely match to a grid. If you’re doing something hard surface that’s very modular then you can probably still use grid snapping but most games aren’t like that.
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That was a thing back in the Unreal 1 / UT days when 90% of the map was modelled and constructed in the editor via CSG tools. I think the theory was grid snapping would allegedly keep you from constructing things that would “break” the resulting BSP. 
It doesn’t matter now afaik.
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Thanks! I definitely remember an old Unreal tutorial video on the Collector’s Edition of Unreal Tournament 3 saying that it was a good practice, but that was 15 years ago. lol. Thanks, yo! Much obliged.
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