Community-Game-Development-Toolkit

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Unity Basics

Once you open Unity, you’ll see something like this: unity interface

Parts of the interface

labelled interface

Project

Dispalyes assets associated with your project. Assets include image files of drawings, photos and 360-degree photos you will use in your scenes, as well as materials, scripts, and other aspects of your project that are stored as files. The tutorial will cover which assets to focus on and how you can easily manage them.

Scene

A 3D view of the current scene that you’re editing. Each scene contains a particular combination of objects, photos and drawings that you compose in 3D. During gameplay, you can control how the player moves between scenes

Hierarchy

A list of objects and components that are in the current scene. You can click on an object’s name to highlight it in the scene, and collect objects together in groups using this panel. You can rename objects to make them easier to keep track of.

Inspector

When you click on an object in your scene, its properties will appear in the inspector. When using the Community Game Development Toolkit, you won’t have to deal with most of these properties. We will have to use some of them, however, which will be indicated in the tutorial.

Manipulating the 3D view in the Scene Panel

If a scene is not visible, open one of the example scenes by clicking on the Example Scenes folder in the Projects tab. Double click one of the scenes to open it in the Scene panel.

example scene

Hand Tool

Now choose the Hand tool from the toolbar:

unity toolbar

Use this tool to move the camera around the scene. This tool does not change the angle of where the camera is looking.

Shortcut: You can also use the hand tool by dragging with the middle/scroll-wheel button on your mouse, or pressing Q.

Orbit Tool

Press the option (mac) or alt (windows) key to change the hand tool to the orbit tool. Now move the camera angle around with the mouse or trackpad

Shortcut: You can also orbit the camera by dragging with the right mouse button

Zooming In/Out

Use the scroll wheel or trackpad scroll

Manipulating Objects in the Scene

The 3D space in the scene is organized along a set of X-Y-Z axes. This axis gizmo in the top right of your scene tells you which axis is pointing where:

axis gizmo

Move Tool

move tool

Select this tool, and select an object in the scene. You’ll see controls on the object that look like this:

move controls

Move the red, green and blue arrows to move the object along the X, Y and Z axes. If you’re unsure about which axis is whcih, try different arrows to see which direction the object moves in.

You can also move the object by dragging the small reg, green and blue squares at the center of the move controller. This moves the object along 3 different planes. If you’re unsure how they work, try each one to see which directions it moves the object in.

Shortcut: Access this tool using the the W key

Rotating

rotate tool

Select this tool and you’ll see controls like this:

rotate controls

Drag the colored circles to rotate the object around different axes.

Shortcut: Access this tool using the the E key

Scaling

scale tool

Select this tool and you’ll see controls like this:

scale controls

Click and drag the white box to scale the object up and down. Click and drag colored boxes to scale the object along single axes.

Shortcut: Access this tool using the the R key

Creating 3D primitives (basic 3D shapes)

You won’t do this often while using the Community Game Development Toolkit, but it can be useful to understand how to create basic 3D shapes in your scene. Note that 3D primitives in the scene show up in the scene hierarchy (the panel on the left), but do not show up in the project panel (the bottom of the window).

You can create primitives from the GameObjects menu:

game objects menu

Also from the ‘+’ button in the hierarchy panel:

game objects panel

Types of Objects