Nimble Poles | Power Lines & Utility Poles

Power lines are set dressing. They should take minutes, not an evening of dragging prefabs and eyeballing sag.

Nimble Poles is a scene tool for laying utility poles and wires the way you would sketch them: Ctrl+Click the ground and a wired pole appears. Keep clicking and the run grows. Drag instead, and a whole evenly spaced, ground-snapped run is laid in one gesture. Or flip on Freehand draw and sketch the line by hand: poles follow your stroke, evenly spaced, and sharp bends keep a pole on the corner.

Ctrl+Shift+Click a wall and a service drop lands on the building, aligned to the surface and mounted to it, so it follows if the building ever moves.

Your scene stays clean. The scene file stores exactly one component: the manager that owns the data. Every pole and cable you see is a generated view, rebuilt after each edit and never saved into the scene. Scene files stay small, merges stay sane, and every operation is plain undoable data.

It performs. All wires in a network are one merged mesh drawn in a single draw call, with thickness expanded in the vertex shader. Poles static-batch at runtime. A scene with thousands of wire segments renders like a handful of objects.

Poles get personality. Real pole lines are never perfectly straight or plumb. Placement adds a touch of random yaw and lean, tunable per network, per selection, or per pole: inherit the network's scatter, roll your own seed, or author an exact lean. Reroll any scope for a fresh scatter.

Editing is direct. Click a node, or a cable, and edit it in the inspector: position, yaw, tilt, model override, wires. Hover a wire row and that cable lights up in the scene; click it to jump to the wire's own card. Box-select for batch edits across a whole run, or move and rotate the whole selection with one handle. Subdivide a span, fill a gap with evenly spaced poles, insert a pole into an existing wire, rewire through deletions. Networks are curation: rename, merge, move nodes between them, select a whole run in one click.

It respects your forest. The tree clearance tool marks every terrain tree inside a wire corridor, filterable by type and height, and clears the ones you confirm. Undoable, and prop GameObjects are never touched.

It ships with your game. By default the view rebuilds on scene load, which is fast at powerline scale. For baked lightmaps, occlusion culling or navmesh workflows, Bake View For Build freezes the view into ordinary static scene objects, and Unbake brings the live workflow back.

Not every pole needs every wire. Toggle which anchors carry wires per pole, and a span only carries as many cables as its thinner end: the branch toward one house runs a single wire from the right insulator while the main run stays full. The choice is inherited as you keep placing, so a thin branch keeps growing thin.

Bring your own art, or start with ours. A hand-painted utility pole and a matching wall tap are included and assigned by default. Swap in any prefab: add anchor components at the insulator tips and every anchor carries a cable, however many you author. Taps take per-tap model overrides with rotation and position offsets, and a tap model can author an anchor of its own so the line lands on the model, the way the bundled wall tap catches it at its mast tip.

What's included
- Full C# source (runtime and editor assemblies), no DLLs
- Hand-painted utility pole with a custom collision mesh, and a matching wall tap
- Demo scene, offline manual, Getting Started window
- Scene-view shortcut overlay and a fully iconed custom inspector

Requirements
- Unity 6 or newer
- Universal Render Pipeline (URP). The bundled wire shader and materials target URP; Built-in and HDRP are not supported in this version.