From the course: Unreal Essential Training (2019)

Placing and manipulating actors - Unreal Engine Tutorial

From the course: Unreal Essential Training (2019)

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Placing and manipulating actors

- [Instructor] Actors are any objects that can be placed into a level. And they are essential to creating anything that can be seen or interacted with in your project. Actors are a generic class that inherently support 3D transformations such as translation, rotation, and scale. So that's what we're going to be talking about for a moment. Let's head over to the modes panel. And go ahead and click and drag a basic point light out into the scene. And if you're still in unlit, go ahead and switch to lit for dramatic effect. Now this point light here, you'll notice that there's a multi-colored gizmo centered at the origin. This is Unreal's transform controls. You can also control this by selecting this button here. Now if you'd like to rotate it, you can either click this button or hit the keyboard command E. You'll see that the widget changes to show you that there's a new way of controlling this asset. With rotation, you simply hover over one of these axes and drag. And finally that brings us to scale or R. Again, the gizmo changed to show that there's a new control that's available. And if you don't like using W-E-R to cycle between these you can simply hit space. Something to keep in mind is not every actor responds in the same way to these gizmos. For example, when I scale this point light the only thing that changes is the attenuation radius which I can also change straight in the details panel. However, if I were to rotate this there isn't really any substantial change. And if I translate it around, of course there is a change. Whenever you're working with these gizmos there's a few things to keep in mind. The essential controls are hover over an axis and click and drag to move in a constrained way along that axis. So I'm moving in the X direction, in the Y direction, or if I switch over to rotation, I am only rotating along the X axis or around the Z axis. And finally with scale, I can bend it in just one axis or the other. However, you can also affect them in multiple axes at a time. And you do that by simply hovering your mouse at the intersection between those axes until they both light up. So in this case, if I hover over the X and Y axes now I can move it along the plane of the floor without changing its Z axis. And vice versa. Or I can change only the Y and Z axis at a time without changing its X location. In addition to controlling the transforms of your actors via the gizmo, you can also head to the details panel and control them in a much more fine-grained way. Now let's talk a moment about snaps. At the top here or where you can enable and disable snapping as well as control the degree to which it snaps. Let's enable transform snapping. Now instead of smoothly moving along this axis you'll notice that it snaps into 10-centimeter increments. And we can change this. So we can break it down to one centimeter where you can still see that it's sort of jittering around snapping to centimeter by centimeter or we can go all the way up to 1,000 centimeters where it's not going to change at all unless we move this greater than 1,000. And finally something like 100. And these snaps apply to each of the transform controls. And so if I set that to 90 degrees, then as you can see only right angles are accepted. Unreal Engine handles quite a few things for you when it comes to placing actors in a scene. Let's go ahead and drag in a couple of cubes to demonstrate. Notice how as I dropped it, this one automatically snapped so that it was co-planar with this top surface of this cube. Now if I drag this up, I'm going to turn off my snaps. And then hit the end key. It will automatically find the nearest surface that it collides with and drop it to that level. This is particularly helpful with things like spheres where you want to make sure that it's exactly touching the surface and not intersecting it. Also at any point if you have something selected and you don't want to anymore, you can simply hit escape to deselect. In addition to that, if you have something that you want two of, you can hold alt while dragging on the gizmo to duplicate. And finally, if you're let's say zoomed in to a particular object and you want to make sure that you keep that same view, you can hold shift while you drag so that the camera moves along with that asset as well. Now you're fully equipped to pick and place any assets in your scene. You can now arrange, rotate, and scale them to your heart's content.

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