Blender Grid Units Addon

See dimensions at a glance instead of counting grid lines. Add units to the perspective and orthographic grids!

Choose from a variety of font themes, overlay settings, and even supply your own texture atlas of unit characters that you've meticulously designed while procrastinating.

Tested on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

Email quaternioff AT gmail DOT com for support/questions.

Overview

The grid units are responsive to the existing grid scale, subdivisions, and overall blender UI scale settings. Further options are added to the viewport overlay menu: on/off toggle, a scale multiplier for the unit labels, as well as their tint and opacity. The addon preferences define defaults for new scenes and take effect on next startup. Font/unit texture configs take effect immediately.

The unit cards use lookups on a regular png texture; you can copy/modify this atlas to contain any glyphs/representation you want, provided the size remains at 512x512 and glyphs are divided into a 5x5 grid. The addon prefs allow you to set a path to this custom texture.

The unit labels have an algorithm that maintains visibility and avoids crowding based on window/viewport pixel size and viewport camera properties.

Units are drawn in batch, with limiting of how many cards are drawn based on view frustum intersections with the perspective/ortho grid, to maintain high performance.

There are ratings/reviews on blendermarket, but please purchase from here as the site fees are very high over there.

Changelog

v6
* Unit packing, with addon prefs and Scene Units menu. This is useful for modular part workflows, common in game dev. E.g. where 1 unit is 512 cm, and you want the full units for your scene, but a grid that shows whole numbers for every 512 cm.

v5
* Ensuring labels reflect the scene's unit length scale setting.
* Improved rounding method, towards nearest grid line spacing, if the jumps between major units at the current viewing distance are at least that size.

v4
* Allowing the overall viewport show/hide toggle to control the grid unit settings, keeping it more in line with how the other viewport overlay controls work.

v3
* Adding support for length preference to be reflected in the labels used, e.g. centimeters, inches, meters, feet.
* Fixing labels for imperial unit system.
* Evened out ortho vs. perspective scale bump.
* Added a hack for imperial units to mimic the sort of major grid line jumps the Blender grid is doing at various scales; it's a confusing set of grid lines to begin with, but this addon's labels need to follow them.
* Fixing a draw issue with +Z/-Z axis orthographic at very small view distances.

v2
* Mac OS X support, better cross-platform shader code.