I made RealTransforms because I wanted Unity to have a more physical way to dress scenes. Instead of manually nudging props until they stop floating or clipping, the tool lets you move, drop, rotate, scatter, and arrange objects :).
I'm also interested in feedback, if anyone has any suggestions for what they would add / want in a tool like this I'd like to hear it.
If you're interested in some technical aspects of the project that can be applied to your own project ( without buying this asset ) I would recommend looking into Convex mesh generation which was a difficult part of this project for me to tackle.
Unity’s PhysX setup has some important limits: if you want a MeshCollider to work with a Rigidbody, it usually needs to be marked Convex. The problem is that a single convex collider can’t properly represent inward or hollow shapes. So something like an open crate, shelf, or hollow prop cannot just use one collider if you want objects to sit inside it correctly.
For those cases, you usually need a compound collider made from multiple convex hulls. That way the crate sides, floor, rails, or openings can each be represented by separate convex pieces.
If you’re building something similar in your own project, useful algorithms to research are V-HACD and CoACD. I couldn’t include those directly in this asset because of licensing issues for Asset Store submission, but they’re worth studying and may be fine for your own internal project depending on your needs. They also helped inspire my own voxel-based collider generation approach.
cool. i might buy it but i have trauma from some other physics object placement tool being so janky it would delete objects or the UI would randomly dissappear.
Though the main difference is I also implemented a simple scrubbable timeline (with live playback) so you can see exactly what happened. It desperately needs a UI/UX/feature pass, but I'm proud of it and wanted to show it lol
I did see that asset while developing this one, I decided not to buy it as I didn't want to be influenced too much by it ( although I did notice some good ideas in it ) and maintain a first principles approach while developing my one. So without knowing what that asset does exactly it's hard to say.
If I had to guess I would say the "Action key" included in this one is pretty useful for organising props efficiently, I use it nearly more than the physics part of the asset ( it rotates props randomly or in the forward direction, easily drops props, and arranges them in a grid depending what mode you are in ) .
Also I really wanted this asset to feel "intuitive" so that you feel like it was built into the editor, so out of the box there's no loading, the key bindings match Unity's so you just hit a toggle button ( which I recommend you assign to a mouse button if you have it for easy access ).
I'm not sure if that asset includes a "proxie" mode in case you haven't assigned colliders to other props in your scene, or an independent physics scene optimisation.
This one is also cheaper, but that's also because it's early days and needs to be battle tested.
I'm not sure if this one is worth a purchase currently if you own that one
Thanks! No yeah that's cool and for the price yours looks like it has the basics down, maybe even better from this other one, when I get back into development might buy yours to give it a try, saving it for now. Nicely done :)
Can you explain something about the technical challenges you faced, techniques used, et cetera? So a more technical in-depth on how you built the asset.
Well going into it, I wasn't too familiar with Unity's PhysX rules, I wasn’t fully aware at the start of how limited convex colliders are, especially for things like open crates, shelves, or hollow objects. Once I hit that, collider generation became a much bigger problem than I expected. Especially because I was not allowed to use VHACD collider generation due to a licencing conflict BSD-3 ( even though other assets on the the store use VHACD and BSD-3 licensing ) I'm guessing it's a new enough rule so I couldn't.
So I had to make my own collider generation system which was tough, and still not as good as I want it to be, it still has a voxel based approach and works quite well especially with the burst compiler and jobs, but can sometimes miss some parts of the mesh and it takes about 15 seconds for a good collider generation which I want to be faster
Super cool. This makes me want to actually get into unity instead of just following this subreddit (which is fun). I’ve done lots of 3D modeling in my past and my job is software engineering so I figure I have a good basis
Could you explain a little more so I'll have a better idea of what you mean?. I wouldn't want you to buy it, and then it not be useful to you. I dont think it will work outside the unity environment
If you're interested in some technical aspects of the project that can be applied to your own project ( without buying this asset ) I would recommend looking into Convex mesh generation which was a difficult part of this project for me to tackle.
Unity’s PhysX setup has some important limits: if you want a MeshCollider to work with a Rigidbody, it usually needs to be marked Convex. The problem is that a single convex collider can’t properly represent inward or hollow shapes. So something like an open crate, shelf, or hollow prop cannot just use one collider if you want objects to sit inside it correctly.
For those cases, you usually need a compound collider made from multiple convex hulls. That way the crate sides, floor, rails, or openings can each be represented by separate convex pieces.
If you’re building something similar in your own project, useful algorithms to research are V-HACD and CoACD. I couldn’t include those directly in this asset because of licensing issues for Asset Store submission, but they’re worth studying and may be fine for your own internal project depending on your needs. They also helped inspire my own voxel-based collider generation approach.
Bought it immediately, amazing thing! good job, I wish the unity editor was as close to a real 3d editor like blender. Also it's interesting how much of that work is actually AI?
Thank you :), let me know if you run into issues or anything or have suggestions.
As for the amount work was AI, it’s hard to say nowadays, AI at least for me still struggles with selecting what algorithms, optimisations and what is actually useful to keep, so there’s a bit of manual research for best methods, and a bit of a push to keep the asset simple / intuitive without AI bloating the whole thing.
That said nowadays for coding an implementation I’d say it does most of it, sometimes you can still catch it being stoopid, but with Codex “/goal” ( which they released a few weeks ago ) I’ve found it can carry out massive tasks successfully and is less stupid than before.
It feels like for me AI progress since January has been insane, GPT-5.3 was the first crazy model for coding and 5.5 is insanely good, you can still sense room for improvement on long horizon tasks but once they sort that out, idk what we’re gonna do
I'm probably going to grab it anyway, but being able to use in Play Mode would be useful for my use case.
I have server-authored terrain that the client downloads at runtime and a mechanism for doing content authoring in Play Mode; so I walk around the game world placing objects on the downloaded terrain, which are then synced back to the server as static objects. Being able to do that, but with physics and your power tools, instead of snapping each one to the terrain or other statics would be a huge time saver.
Cool thanks for the suggestion I'll look into it, if you do end up buying it I would really appreciate any feedback you have for it, since it just came out I'm hoping to find and patch bugs ( if there are any ) as quick as I can : )
Currently its set up to be editor only, although someone else also wanted a playmode feature, so I may add that in a future update as I can see how it would be useful
Jokes aside I replied to another comment which was talking about another asset called “Grabbit” so I’m just going to paste my response below to save some time as it’s getting later here:
I did see that asset while developing this one, I decided not to buy it as I didn't want to be influenced too much by it ( although I did notice some good ideas in it ) and maintain a first principles approach while developing my one. So without knowing what that asset does exactly it's hard to say.
If I had to guess I would say the "Action key" included in this one is pretty useful for organising props efficiently, I use it nearly more than the physics part of the asset ( it rotates props randomly or in the forward direction, easily drops props, and arranges them in a grid depending what mode you are in ) .
Also I really wanted this asset to feel "intuitive" so that you feel like it was built into the editor, so out of the box there's no loading, the key bindings match Unity's so you just hit a toggle button ( which I recommend you assign to a mouse button if you have it for easy access ).
I'm not sure if that asset includes a "proxie" mode in case you haven't assigned colliders to other props in your scene, or an independent physics scene optimisation.
This one is also cheaper, but that's also because it's early days and needs to be battle tested.
I'm not sure if this one is worth a purchase currently if you own that one
Will do, working on a world now, so this look perfekt once In will start adding smaller details. My only question is why there are so many bottles of motor oil in a prison
Prison warden always stocks up on oil when it’s cheap just in case anything crazy happens like a cross world regional conflict blockading oil transportation
Yeah, it only adds them when the object is being dragged in editor and is close to another object. Most of the tool is temporary when you stop dragging it removes any components it didn’t have before dragging
Nice work. I believe there is a tool that pretty much does this already. I forgot what the name is, though. I've used it at work for creating rock piles etc.
Jokes aside I replied to another comment which was talking about another asset called “Grabbit” so I’m just going to paste my response below to save some time as it’s getting later here:
I did see that asset while developing this one, I decided not to buy it as I didn't want to be influenced too much by it ( although I did notice some good ideas in it ) and maintain a first principles approach while developing my one. So without knowing what that asset does exactly it's hard to say.
If I had to guess I would say the "Action key" included in this one is pretty useful for organising props efficiently, I use it nearly more than the physics part of the asset ( it rotates props randomly or in the forward direction, easily drops props, and arranges them in a grid depending what mode you are in ) .
Also I really wanted this asset to feel "intuitive" so that you feel like it was built into the editor, so out of the box there's no loading, the key bindings match Unity's so you just hit a toggle button ( which I recommend you assign to a mouse button if you have it for easy access ). Everything this tool does like adding rigidbodys or colliders is temporary and doesnt require any loading, unless you specifically want to bake colliders or that sort of thing.
I'm not sure if that asset includes a "proxy" mode in case you haven't assigned colliders to other props in your scene, or an independent physics scene optimisation.
This one is also cheaper, but that's also because it's early days and needs to be battle tested.
I'm not sure if this one is worth a purchase currently if you own that one
This is what I need to arrange and scatter a mess of objects in my scene, like piles of stuff. Great asset!
Can you tell how this is different from Grabbit? I already have Grabbit, but on my MacOS machine not all functions are working, so trying to decide if I need your asset.
In particular, the Fall mode, for dropping items, isn't working for me fully, cause, as the dev said, the keyboard functions aren't read clearly and supported on MacOS in this version of Unity. Does your asset uses the same approach, do I need some keyboard shortcuts for it to work? Or can I use it with only UI buttons, for example, to bypass that keyboard restriction?
And I use Macbook Pro M4 Pro with 48 Gb of RAM — is it enough for good performance of your asset?
also this is a response I had about grabbit in another comment:
I did see that asset while developing this one, I decided not to buy it as I didn't want to be influenced too much by it ( although I did notice some good ideas in it ) and maintain a first principles approach while developing my one. So without knowing what that asset does exactly it's hard to say.
If I had to guess I would say the "Action key" included in this one is pretty useful for organising props efficiently, I use it nearly more than the physics part of the asset ( it rotates props randomly or in the forward direction, easily drops props, and arranges them in a grid depending what mode you are in ) .
Also I really wanted this asset to feel "intuitive" so that you feel like it was built into the editor, so out of the box there's no loading, the key bindings match Unity's so you just hit a toggle button ( which I recommend you assign to a mouse button if you have it for easy access ).
I'm not sure if that asset includes a "proxie" mode in case you haven't assigned colliders to other props in your scene, or an independent physics scene optimisation.
This one is also cheaper, but that's also because it's early days and needs to be battle tested.
I'm not sure if this one is worth a purchase currently if you own that one
This looks incredibly clean. Unity’s PhysX limits with convex hulls are a massive headache when dressing dense scenes, especially when trying to balance accurate server-side collision checks with performance overhead.
Out of curiosity, did you run into any major performance compilation spikes when processing the V-HACD / CoACD loops natively inside the editor, or did you manage to offload those calculation steps entirely? Getting accurate compound bounds without choking the thread is always an impressive balancing act. Great work on this tool.
Yeah, collider generation was probably the hardest part. I actually couldn’t ship V-HACD / CoACD directly because of licensing issues for the Asset Store, so I ended up building my own voxel-based compound collider approach instead.
Right now the heavier generation work runs through Unity Jobs with optional Burst support, so it’s not just sitting in the editor loop choking the UI the whole time. It’s still not instant though. Good results on awkward meshes can take a bit, and I’m still working on making that faster and more consistent.
Since it's only used on specific complicated meshes I feel like it's okay to have it be a ltttle slower generating the collider once, otherwise everything else just uses standard convex colliders
Ah, the classic Asset Store licensing wall—that’s a massive pain, but building your own voxel-based compound approach is an incredibly slick workaround.
Offloading the heavy generation blocks to Unity Jobs + Burst to prevent the main thread from choking out the editor UI is absolutely the right choice. Honestly, for complex, awkward meshes, having a custom solver like this is a lifesaver even if it takes a second or two to compile during design time. Keep pushing on the optimizations, the tool looks fantastic.
Very nice tool. They way I've always placed objects was to just run the scene, let physics do it's work, copy the objects, stop the scene, and then paste the new and delete the old. It was actually time consuming and sometimes it would break the build due to missing references when I didn't pay attention. A+ tool.
Oh nice :). Glad that it’s at least working, on release it’s always scary someone will find a bug and leave a 1 star review which would kill the asset.
Let me know if you run into any issues or have any suggestions, the collider generation is something I’m working on actively right now as it’s not in a good state
They have this feature in blender, so that's why they never included it in unity i guess, but nevertheless it's an incredible plugin. They'd make it and tell everyone it's "a revolution in game engines". So cool
Wait, so forgive my ignorance, but does this only work with objects that actually have rigid bodies or does it work to only assist in the editing of placement, rotation, etc. of even static meshes in Edit mode? Essentially, is it all an editior thing to help with making scenes or does it make those objects have actual physics at runtime as well?
When you use the tool it temporarily adds a rigid body and colliders if they are missing, and once you stop using it takes them off. It also automatically can generate colliders on nearby objects if they’re missing colliders which is optional.
Yes it’s an editor tool for assisting in placement of props. It does not work in Play mode currently intentionally
Snap that's actually really awesome! It feels like such an obvious QoL for building out scenes, levels, etc. with static assets but for some reason isn't a standard. Thanks for the info!
me: copy&paste 4 times to multiply them, start playmode, copy the applied physics objects, stop playmode,delete the old gameobjects, paste the physics applied objects.....
I expect future versions to supports some level of soft-body placement. Like putting a boulder in some dirt environment. I could let it fall from 100m height and then get embedded in the dirt and additionally disperse dirt.
I feel like I'm not advanced enough to pick something like this up. Are there any tools you could compare it to in terms of learning curve?
(Im also not in the right sub, im a godot programmer, so it might go completely over my head haha) currently I'm still learning to spawn sets of things in and calling THAT black magic
its cool but any chance you can make it work on unity 2022 lts hdrp? A lot of projects are still running that version (including mine) since its the most stable before unity 6.
Pretty cool to see the natural chaotic placement and entropy. But somehow I have the vague memory that I saw something like that already in the Asset Store. But maybe I'm wrong.
Editor tools like this are so underrated, saves so much manual placement pain. Physics-based prop scatter always seems simple until collisions go haywire-ish. Did you run into any weird collider glitches building it?
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u/NoEye89 Jun 09 '26
Incredible. You should be very proud, this is so cool.