Quick tip — Shortcuts to make level design easy in Unity

In this short article, I will be providing you with some shortcuts to help speed up your level design process.

Tool switch

Pressing the following buttons will switch your tool to the mapped tool.

“q”: hand tool: move around the scene

“w”: move tool: move the object along its axis

“e”: rotate tool: rotate the object along its axis

“r”: scale tool: scale the object along its axis

“t”: rect tool: move and resize the object based on the rectangle outline around it

“y”: move/rotate/scale tool: is a combination of all the tools above

Snap view to the selected object.

Clicking the “f” button will snap your view to the currently selected object.

Change the perspective view.

In the scene view, you can snap to a different perspective by clicking the perspective tool in the right corner. This can help you quickly switch to top-down or side-view perspectives.

Move in quarter units

Holding the “ctrl” button when interacting with an asset along one of its axis will move in quarter units (0.25f). In my example below I move the left object without holding the button and the right button while holding the button. This works on rotation as well (rotating in 15-degree increments).

Vertex snapping

Holding the “v” key with an object selected will put you into a vertex selection mode. You can then this object over to another object and snap the vertices together.

Duplicate currently selected object(s)

Pressing “ctrl” + “d” while you have an object will duplicate that object, it works when you have multiple objects selected as well.

Change the hand position mode

Pressing the “z” key will switch between pivot and centre modes.

Pivot positions the tool at the pivot point of the object, this can be a point defined by the user

Center positions the tool at the centre position of the object

That‘s’ all for now.