Unable to Move the Canvas or Change Any of the Transform Values

Question

I am using Unity 5 and I started to make a menu scene. When I made the canvas, all of values under the Rect Transform component are locked and it says "some values driven by Canvas." The only thing I can change is the z position when using the gizmo in the editor. I can't reset the position or anything. Why is this happening?

Solution 1

This means that the canvas's canvas component has it's render mode set to Screen space - overlay. This forces it to be the size of the screen. Change it to World Space and it will allow you to resize it and move it around.

Solution 2

Changing the Render mode is not an ideal solution; neither is Overlay mode the reason why this is happening at all. World Space is just a render mode that changes the way your whole UI behaves and would mean a whole different set up and a whole lot more work just to get a child UI object to move independently.

Here is the description of what World Space is for from the Unity site:

In this render mode, the Canvas will behave as any other object in the scene. The size of the Canvas can be set manually using its Rect Transform, and UI elements will render in front of or behind other objects in the scene based on 3D placement. This is useful for UIs that are meant to be a part of the world. This is also known as a “diegetic interface”.

The Rect Transform usually gets locked because it is a child of another Canvas Object which controls its Transforms. The way to fix this is to overwrite it by adding a “Layout Element” component to it. From there you can configure it to work the way you like and it can have transforms independent of the Parent UI Object.

For full details, see this Unity support page: https://support.unity3d.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000179163-How-to-overwrite-Width-and-Height-values-that-are-driven-by-a-Layout-Group-in-runtime-

Solution 3

Canvas is depend on game tab in your window panel. Adjust panel by use of close tab or resize panel or doc game panel. It will help you make default 800 X 600 canvas.

Comments

[Shukri Adams]

Mike Brockbank's answer made more sense if the canvas element in question is part of a UI layout.

[Haagimus]

This is the correct answer, works perfectly. Please mark this as correct!