v0.97.0-rc1 Put It There

Building a level takes less care now. What you click is what gets selected, pieces drag into place on the surfaces they belong on and snap corner to corner, a face can grow into a separate block, and materials are shared across the whole project from one place.

This is a beta. Switch the Hub to the beta channel to try it.

You select what you click

Clicking in the viewport selects what is drawn under the cursor. Models and shapes used to be picked by rough bounds, so a large floor or building model took clicks aimed at anything standing on it, and standing inside a room box selected the room every time. Now the crate on the floor is the crate.

Selecting anything, from anywhere, unfolds its parents in the Hierarchy so its row is on screen.

Place things on surfaces

The new place tool (key 0) picks up whatever you click and drags it over the scene. It rests on the surface under the cursor — a floor, a wall, the underside of a ceiling, terrain — with its bottom touching, not its middle. The rest of the selection comes along. align in the Tools strip turns it to follow the surface, and grid snap slides it along the surface in steps.

Models, prefabs and maps dragged in from the Assets tab land the same way, and a ring shows where they will land before you let go.

Snap corner to corner

With the Move or Place tool, hold V: the corner of the selection nearest the cursor is marked. Drag, and that corner lands exactly on the nearest corner of any model, shape or map mesh under the cursor. This is how a modular kit goes together — no measuring, no nudging.

The Move gizmo's centre is now a round knob you can actually grab. It used to lose every click to the arrows around it. Dragging it keeps the point you grabbed under the cursor at any zoom.

Extrude into a new object

In the Model tool, hold Shift and drag a selected face's move handle: a separate block grows out of the face and follows the drag, and the mesh it came from stays as it was. The block is closed, wears the same materials, and arrives selected, ready to pull again. It is also ⬆ As object in the Model tab, in the right-click menu, and on the ' key. Split off keeps the faces' materials now too.

Project materials, and one place to edit a material

The files under materials/ are now project materials that anything can use. In the Model tab, select faces and click a project material's swatch: they wear it, and they change whenever it does. Build forty wall pieces from one "Brick" and a single edit restyles them all.

Every material — a node's, a model part's, a map face slot's — now shows as a chip with its swatch and name. Click one and the Inspector becomes that material's editor, with ⬅ Back to return. From there you can follow a project material, save a material as a new one, or keep a copy of your own. Selecting a material file in Assets edits it in place, and the change reaches everything using it as you make it. Window ▸ Material opens the selected node's material; the floating Material Editor window is gone.

A clearer Assets tab

Each kind of asset has its own colour, carried by the tile's tint, a band along its top, its glyph and a label under the name. Textures show their own picture and materials a swatch. The tree view uses the same colours, and long names are shortened to fit instead of running off the tile.

Upgrading

Nothing to do. Scenes open as they were, and materials you already have stay your own until you choose a project material for them. Presets you saved before are the project materials now.