Given I’m currently learning to develop in Unity I thought I’d share a few tips I pick up along the way to becoming proficient with it.

When creating a scene in Unity you’ll work with loads of different GameObjects. Your virtual world is built out of them (Floors, walls, trees everything) and you’ll be manipulating them all the time.

One thing you’ll notice is the more GameObjects you have the more complex it becomes placing things correctly. Trying to line everything up, preventing different objects overlapping, and just generally making things look as they should, can consume a lot of time.

Thankfully there are a few things you can do to make life a whole lot simpler. First is learning to navigate around the environment, second duplicating objects, third vertex snapping.

Navigating the environment

The odds are good if you’re doing VR development in Unity you’ve played at least some 3D person shooter on a PC or Console. If so, you’re in luck because navigating in a 3D unity scene can be exactly like this with a few extras. Click and hold the right mouse button and you’ll be able to look around the environment with your mouse and use the WASD keys to move forward (W), backward (S), strafe left (A), and right (D). A little extra something for moving quickly is selecting a GameObject and pressing the F key to jump to it for manipulation.

Duplicating objects

When creating an environment it’s essential to duplicate GameObjects or groups of objects. To do this is very easy, just select the GameObject and do what you’d do to duplicate and just like text in a text editor, copy and paste. Easy as that you’ll have a duplicate item to move around and position in the scene.

Vertex snapping

For the first few months I was learning I didn’t know about this one and boy does it save some time and frustration. Let’s say you’ve got a section of wall and you’ve duplicated it to make the wall bigger. You move your newly duplicated wall GameObject to line it up with the original and you slide it along just a little, you eyeball it and there’s a small gap. You move it back a little and now it overlaps. This sort of thing can go on and on. Vertex snapping will save you from hours of repetition by allowing you to snap two objects together cleanly.

To do this, select the move tool then select the GameObject you want to move. Now hold down the V key, move your cursor to a vertex, then click and drag it to the vertex of the GameObject you want to snap to. Now release the mouse button and boom, just like that, you’ll have a perfectly placed GameObject in line with the first.

Now to be completely honest it can be difficult to get your head around vertex snapping from reading a text description of it. Thankfully a number of people have made excellent YouTube videos showing just how it’s done. Here’s one I found useful:

For more information on vertex snapping and a whole lot more, see the Positioning GameObjects section of the Unity manual.