Pattern Painter - Procedural Prefab Placement

Place thousands of prefabs in seconds

Pattern Painter is a Unity Editor tool for repetitive object placement. Drag a Paint Volume over your scene, pick a pattern, and get thousands of real prefab instances exactly where you want them - tiles on a floor, crops in a field, cars in a parking lot, seats in a stadium, fences along a ridge, rivets on a hull.

Every placement is a live preview until you commit it, and the whole run is undoable after you do.

Choose where to paint

Drag a box or cylinder Paint Volume anywhere in your scene and paint into it - no need to select a GameObject first. Every surface inside the volume receives placement points: several Meshes at once, a Terrain, or geometry you cannot re-parent. Terrain is a first-class surface and does not need a Collider.

The volume only paints inside itself, so geometry above it doesn't block the pattern and geometry below it isn't caught.

'Fill Misses at Volume Bottom' creates new floors, bridges and floating platforms without a temporary base Mesh. Surface hits still win; only misses use the volume's bottom face.

The Paint Volume is not a scene object: it adds no component, never appears in the Hierarchy, and never dirties your scene.

Start from a base pattern

• Rectangular grids
• Checkerboards
• Straight lines
• Arcs and circles
• Rectangle, triangle, pentagon, hexagon, oval, star, arrow and zigzag lines
• Concentric circles
• Radial spokes from a center point

Then shape it to your scene

• Use multiple prefabs in a single pattern
• Offset the pattern's center
• Rotate the entire pattern
• Face every object toward the pattern's center, or toward its center line so two rows face each other
• Turn every object by the same rotation offset
• Randomize placement points to break up repetition
• Offset individual placement points
• Control grid cell size and spacing along lines
• Turn any grid into a checkerboard
• Change the size of circular patterns and the spacing between rings
• Cut an empty hole in the middle of a circular pattern
• Align created objects to the Terrain or Mesh surface beneath them

Built for large scenes

• Live preview handles up to 50,000 placement points, so you can drag a slider and watch a large pattern change in real time.
• 250,000 GameObjects in about 7 seconds on our test machine, down from over 5 minutes.
• Spacing tighter than 0.5 units places every point you asked for - coins on a table, tiles, rivets.
• Changed your mind mid-run? Press the Space Bar to abort a long placement.

Fits the way you work

• Undo and Redo the entire bulk creation, so you can keep tuning until the layout is right.
• 'Number Created Instances' numbers each object so you can count a run from the Hierarchy.
• 'Preview Color' tints the ghost preview and the placement point handles to suit your scene.
• Plain-language status messages in the tool window.

Fully localized in five languages

The tool UI and the online documentation are both available in English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Questions people ask

• Which surfaces can it paint on? Meshes and Terrain, and several of them at once. Terrain is a first-class surface and needs no Collider. Placement points project straight down, so Pattern Painter places on ground, floors, platforms and roofs.
• Can I use my own prefabs? Yes - any prefab in your project, and several in the same pattern.
• What do I get when I commit a pattern? Ordinary GameObjects and prefab instances, parented where you asked, that you can edit, move or delete like anything else in your scene.
• Does anything run in my build? No. Pattern Painter is Editor-only - nothing from it ships in your game.
• Can I change my mind? Yes. Press the Space Bar to abort a long placement while it is running, and Undo reverses an entire committed run in one step.