I’ve looked around, and found many, many places where people indicate that either holding down V, or holding down alt-V, while using the transform gizmo will allow you to select a vertex on an object, and snap that object’s vertex to another object’s vertex. However, I am currently unable to make this work in a basic example project. The “blue dots” people mention as indicating vertices that may be snapped to… I can’t get them to show up. At all.
I’d greatly appreciate any pointers anyone might have. This particular bit of functionality is dead-simple in Unity, and I’m hoping that I’m just missing something here, or somehow have a feature turned off…
Vertex snapping is barely usable in Unreal, it’s correct that you have to press V but it only works on some meshes:
As you can see it’s trying to snap the object to the landscape or to the cone (the cubes and the brushes are completely ignored), you don’t have the feature turned off, it just sucks
You can also try to assign a shortcut to “enable vertex snapping”, it seems to work better, but it’s not a great improvement:
Wow. On the plus side, at least you can get the blue vertex indicators to show up. I can’t even get those, even in a very basic right-out-of-the-box FPS sample project. And it crashes pretty regularly saying something like “GPU removed,” as if it were somehow magically hot-swappable or something.
What a strange oversight. I would’ve thought Unreal would be more on-the-ball than this. Are my expectations really that far out of whack with reality?
I use both Unreal and Unity and they both have huge issues imho, but the only thing you can do is live with them (or try to fix them with plugins or workarounds), I could make you an endless list of user experience problems in both engines (Probably I know more in Unreal because I use it more).
I haven’t touched Unity in maybe 5 years, but I remember having fun in it, even when it was troublesome. To be honest, so far I’m having nothing but trouble with Unreal. I want so badly to love it, because so many of the games I love were made using it, and it has a reputation for being on the cutting edge. But the more I read about holes in the docs etc… it gives me pause.
I mean, not to bag on it unnecessarily. It’s obviously an extraordinary, and extraordinarily complex, piece of software. But so far I’m feeling like it just might not be the right fit for me. I keep holding out hope for a “eureka!” moment, though.
I know this is old but in case anyone is struggling with this like I was here is the overcomplicated solution to fixing vertex snapping (unreal 5.4):
MMB (MIDDLE mouse button) on the center of the pivot point when you see the four way arrows pop up. You will get the grabby hand icon when you have successfully done this.
While continuing to hold MMB, click ALT + V. Hold these down together for the remaining steps. Do not release them until done.
Release MMB. Yes, this is correct. It will not work if you continue holding MMB at this point you need to re-click exactly as stated in step 4.
The part I discovered that fixed it for me: move your mouse over one of the arrows (x,y,z axis arrows, the blue red and green ones) as it will not work at all if you keep your mouse over the center of the pivot point because this seems to confuse the whole system. You can now freely click and unclick MMB (continue to hold ALT + V entire time) to change the axis you want to use and this will actually cause the blue vertices to appear and you can move to them.
Still finicky even when following these instructions, but it is about 90% of how I would expect it to work if done properly.
Hope this helps as it was a pain to experiment with especially being new to Unreal.
(In Unity is so much easier)