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Grabbit 2

Grabbit 2 Overview

Grabbit 2 is a Unity Editor tool that makes placing objects in a scene physical. It runs a real Unity PhysX simulation right in the Scene View, so objects don't just look placed: they collide with the world and with each other in real time and settle into believable positions instead of clipping through the floor or one another. It is more than a drag tool. You can select objects by zone or similarity, create new ones by spawning or duplicating, place and drop them under gravity, arrange a group into order, or scatter one apart, all driven by the same live simulation. When you let go, your objects stay where they landed.

Grabbit lives entirely in the Scene View. It is an authoring tool, not a runtime system: the tool itself leaves no components on your objects and adds nothing to your build, so everything happens while you are designing the level. The one thing it can leave behind is optional and deliberate: if you ask it to, Grabbit can bake accurate colliders permanently onto your objects so they ship with your game.

What Can You Do With It?

  • Drop props onto surfaces: grab a crate and let it land flat on the floor or a shelf, no manual snapping
  • Build natural piles and clutter: let objects fall under gravity and stack the way real objects would
  • Scatter and arrange groups: explode a cluster outward, cram it together, randomize it, or align it
  • Spawn whole collections: paint or batch-spawn prefabs from a weighted asset collection and let physics settle them
  • Place against complex geometry: Grabbit can collide accurately against concave meshes, not just bounding boxes

The Five Modes

Grabbit's Scene View overlay has a row of mode buttons. Each mode is a different way of moving objects:

Mode What it does
Select Pick what you're working on (volume, on-screen, or current selection) with filters and combine controls.
Create Spawn objects from an Asset Collection, or by duplicating the prefabs and scene objects you have selected: drop them under the cursor, throw them at a point, fill a box volume, or lay copies out along a line, ring or grid.
Place Move objects freely (hold Space to let them fall and settle under gravity), spread a group with a Box, or slide them onto surfaces with Point.
Arrange Bring order to a selection: Align (onto a line, arc, circle, rectangle, grid or sphere), Level, or Orient.
Scatter Remove order: Randomize, Explode, Cramp, or Nudge.

→ Full walkthrough: The Five Modes

How It Works

When Grabbit is active, your selected objects briefly become physics bodies inside the editor. Grabbit runs a lightweight physics simulation each frame so they push apart, rest on surfaces, and obey gravity, then writes the resulting transforms back to your objects. Nothing about this survives into Play mode or your build; it is purely an editing convenience.

Grabbit also works in Prefab Mode: open a prefab and you can place, arrange, and scatter its parts with the same live simulation, isolated from the rest of the scene. Objects spawned by Create become part of the open prefab, and saving the prefab ends the Grabbit session first, so only your actual content is ever written to the asset.

To collide accurately against detailed meshes, Grabbit can bake colliders in the background, decomposing each mesh into collider pieces with a choice of three strategies: Balance, Precision, or Performance. The first time you grab a complex object it uses a quick approximation, then swaps in the accurate colliders once they finish baking. See Colliders & Baking.

Requirements

Requirement Details
Unity version Unity 6 or newer
Render pipeline Any (Built-in, URP, HDRP)
Where it runs Editor only; Grabbit never ships in your build
Platform Editor on Windows, macOS, and Linux

Grabbit 1 vs Grabbit 2

Grabbit 2 is a ground-up successor to the original Grabbit. If you are on an older Unity version, the original Grabbit (Unity 2022.3+) remains available separately. This documentation covers Grabbit 2.

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