Best practice for working at small physical scales

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1

Godot Version

4.4.1

Question

I’m working on a project where the entire scene is only about 20 cm x 20 cm max. This causes problems because the 3d editor near clipping plane can’t be set closer than 0.01 m and so I can’t zoom in close enough, and fly mode is super fast.

I’ve read that it is best to work in actual physical units and correct scales, since I’m using physics in the project.

What should I do? I could just scale everything up by 100x, and say that the units are centimeters. Then I’d have to adjust the world gravity to 980 instead of 9.8.

Or is there some project setting that sets your units to centimeters, or millimeters, kilometers etc for games at vastly different scales?

2

try to scale it up, not sure that you’d need to edit gravity though. If there was a setting to say meters → cm then it would be doing the same 100x scale (or lack thereof) under the hood, only showing a different unit

3

if my base unit is the centimeter, then i will have to adjust gravity. 9.8 meters per second squared → 980 centimeters per second squared.

And I’ll have to make sure my velocities are set to centimeters per second too.

But yes, I think i will need to scale up. The editor is acting real strange at such small zooms.

4

There’s no meters, centimeters or any real world units in Godot. You decide what one unit in Godot represents.

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5

Yep, there are conventions, but hopefully no assumptions in code (hard-coded constants like gravity for example) so that the engine only deals with numbers,. And then it’s up to us to input consistent variables for the various inputs in equations.