Scene Gizmos

With a player selected, the Scene view draws what its animations do:

• Movement (Anchored Position and Local Position, paths included): a line from start to end, with arrows showing the direction. A ring marks the start and a dot the end.
• Resizing (Size Delta, Offset Min, Offset Max and Scale): the element's outline at several moments during the step, fading in from first to last.

Rotation, colour, fades, shader values, punch and shake, Set Active, sound and Custom Property steps aren't drawn. Nor is a step that doesn't go anywhere, unless it's the selected step.

What the lines mean

The style of a line tells you the mode of the end it leads to:

Line	Mode	Means
Solid	Absolute	The exact value
Dashed	Baseline	An offset from the element's resting value
Dotted	Current	An offset from wherever the step starts

On a movement step, the line follows To's mode. On a resizing step, the last outline follows To's mode and the first outline follows From's (when the step has a From). The outlines in between stay solid.

A Baseline end also shows a faint dashed ghost of the resting value it's measured from. On a resizing step it's the outline at rest. On a movement step it's a faint cross at the resting position, with a faint dashed line to the end. The ghost is left out where it would sit right on top of the line, as it does for a step that starts at rest.

Dragging the start and end

Ends you can drag:

• Movement: drag the dot to move the step's To, and the ring to move its From.
• Resizing: drag a corner or an edge of the last outline to change To. When the step has a From, the first outline has rings at its corners, and dragging it changes From. Hold Shift to keep the proportions: on a corner the box keeps its shape, and on an edge the other side grows with it.

Hover over a handle and its name comes up, for example "Show, step 2: To". It's written into the step as if you'd typed it, so Ctrl+Z undoes it and prefab overrides are marked.

• An end only drags when there's a value behind it. A ring only drags when the step is set to FROM. A step on TO starts wherever the steps before it leave the object, so there's no value of its own there to move.
• Dragging keeps the step's mode. A Baseline To stays an offset from rest, and a Current To stays an offset from where the step starts. Only the number changes.
• A resizing step can't move the element, so the box grows and shrinks around its pivot. With the pivot in the middle, dragging the right edge moves the left edge too. An edge sitting on the pivot can't change anything, so it has no handle.
• Offset Min only moves the bottom-left corner, so only that corner and the left and bottom edges have handles. Offset Max is the same with the top-right corner.
• Scale's Z is never changed by a drag.
• A box that starts with no size, like a pop-in from scale 0, grows in whichever direction you pull it.
• With Snapping on for the step (or the whole animation), the handle moves freely while you drag and rounds to whole numbers when you let go (0.5 rounds up to 1). Scale never snaps.
• A movement path's middle points are moved with Edit Path in Scene, and while that's on, these handles are switched off.
• Shared Animations in a player's Inspector can't be dragged, because that would change the set for every player using it. Drag them from the Animation Set's own Inspector, with Preview On filled.

Tip

When two handles sit on top of each other, like an Open's end on a Close's start, the one whose name shows is the one you'll drag. Click a step in the Inspector to select it and it's drawn on top.

The selected step

The step you last clicked in the Inspector (or a pop-out window) is the selected step. A blue bar down its left edge in the Inspector marks it. Click anywhere on a step to select it: its header, any of its fields, or the margin with its drag handle.

In the Scene view, the selected step:

• is drawn on top of everything else, with a dark outline around its lines and handles, so it stands out on any background
• is always drawn, whatever Show says (except Disabled), even if its animation or the step itself is folded
• is drawn even when it goes nowhere, so a Close that ends at rest can still have its To dragged out

To see the selected step and nothing else, set Show to Selected Step. That's the easiest way to work on a resizing step when several outlines overlap.

Settings

The Scene Gizmos button under the preview buttons opens the settings:

Setting	Options
Show	Disabled · All Animations · Expanded Animations (the default) · Expanded Steps · Selected Step. "Expanded" means open in the Inspector, so you see what you're working on.
Colors	Distinct: a clearly different colour for each drawing (Shuffle Colors for a new set). Rainbow: red for the first step through to purple for the last. Rainbow only works with Expanded Steps.
Outlines	How many outlines a resizing step is drawn with, 2 to 12

These are your own editor preferences, never saved into a scene or asset. Gizmos only draw outside play mode. An Animation Set draws on its Preview On player.

An animation open in a pop-out window is drawn by its window instead, whatever is selected, with its ends still draggable. Show still applies: Disabled draws nothing, Expanded Steps draws the steps open in the window, Selected Step draws the selected step if it's in the window, and anything else draws the whole animation.

Where drawings start

A step without a From is drawn starting from where the steps before it leave the object, so the second step of a slide is drawn from where the first one ends. Drawings hold still while a preview moves the real objects.

They can't know where a different animation left things, though. With All Animations, each is drawn as if played from rest, so a Close that normally follows its Open is drawn from rest.

Under the hood

• The gizmos replay each animation "on paper" from its resting state, sharing the player's own timeline code, stepped eases and path maths rather than copying them. Checked against real playback: every drawn moment lands within 0.07 units of where the object really is, snapping and Play At Custom FPS included.
• During a preview, the resting state is the one the preview captured before anything moved, which is why drawings stay put. The Baseline ghosts are drawn from that resting state too.
• Rainbow isn't used outside Expanded Steps because across whole animations a gradient says nothing a distinct colour doesn't say better. Your choice is kept for when you switch back.
• A drag is turned back into a number with the same maths that drew it, so the handle ends exactly where you let go. Z is never changed: the point moves flat on the canvas.
• For resizing steps, the tool measures how far each corner and edge moves when the value changes by one unit, and works backwards from where you drop it. This works the same for every pivot, anchor, rotation and parent scale. An edge only follows the part of the mouse movement along its own direction.
• A trail outline that would sit within a few pixels of the first or last outline is left out. Otherwise an ease that settles slowly stacks its last moments on top of a dashed or dotted end and fills in the gaps.
• The dark outline is used instead of inverting the colours underneath, because inverted mid-grey is still mid-grey and the line would vanish.
• Unity keeps a highlighted row in every step list (one per animation), so the tool tracks the last clicked step itself. It's remembered until Unity closes, recompiles included.
• No handles appear under a parent scaled to zero (a panel that pops in from nothing). Every point lands in the same place there, so there's no way to tell where you meant.
• Drawing all 30 animations of a large UI prefab costs about 1.3 ms.