Measurement

Drop a ruler into the scene and read the distance between two points, with angles if you need them.

Someone asks whether the doorway is wide enough for the crate, or how far the camera is from the wall it is about to clip. Eyeballing it in a viewport is guesswork. Drop a ruler between the two points and read the number.

Measurements shipped in release 2.0.72.

Place one

Open the asset library and find Measurements. Add Measurement places a ruler in the scene, by click or by drag, the same way a populator or a road goes in.

What it tells you

The ruler carries ticks in metres and centimetres, and labels the distance between its two endpoints along with their separation on each axis, all to two decimal places.

Measurement Options adds direction angles. Three switches, X Angle, Y Angle and Z Angle, each drawing an arc for that axis. Turn on the one you need rather than all three; three arcs on one ruler is harder to read than the number you were after.

Moving the ends

Selecting the ruler itself moves both endpoints together, so the measurement keeps its length and orientation while you reposition it.

To change what is being measured, move one end at a time. The contextual toolbar carries Select Start and Select End, and with one endpoint selected it behaves like any other object: drag it, snap it to a surface, or parent it to something.

That last part is the useful bit. Parent an endpoint to an object and the measurement follows it. Pin one end to a wall and the other to a crate, and the distance updates as you move the crate, so you can push it until the number says what you need rather than nudging and re-measuring.

The endpoint gizmos are global only; the local and smart modes on Transform do not apply to them. Their hit zones are twice the size of the visible dot, which matters when a ruler is small on screen.

Adding a measurement and placing both ends, the distance and the coordinates updating as the second point moves

A measurement in a scene: a dashed ruler between two points, labelled 2.08 m, with the XYZ coordinates of each end shown beside it

Where they live

A new measurement arrives one metre long, laid along X, with its two endpoints named Start and End and the ruler itself named Measurement 1, Measurement 2 and so on.

They are saved with the scene, so they are still there when you come back, and they appear in the Scene Outliner like anything else. The code calls them editor-only.

Related

• Transform for the gizmo and snapping
• Working with objects for parenting, which is how an endpoint follows an object
• Populators, placed from the same library