This tutorial is designed for anyone to quickly learn the main buttons and workspaces in Unity.
Let’s take a look inside of Unity 3D Software and talk about how we interact with this interface.
First off, similar to other cloud software like adobe, we have a manager for the versions of the software. So step one is to download Unity Hub. Once installed go to Add and add the latest build of Unity. The choices you see here are for the device you want the project to play on, you have android, IOS, WebGL, Xbox, Ect.
The main screen of your project is Project. The Hierarchy is where you stage your game objects. The Inspector is where you edit your game objects and other settings. The Scene is where your objects are viewable in 3D space, and lastly Game is where you can view through the virtual camera!
Inside of unity is an animator, recorder, sprite editor, render pipelines, and more.
It is intuitive to figure out how to move the camera around.
There are other windows that are important to bring up. Go to window > and add a window like the Console, when you make an error, this will inform you and tell you what you did wrong in your code, smart troubleshooting!
Instead of giving everyone a copy of Unity with EVERY single feature, they break the program up into downloadable packages. Its found in the Package Manager You just Install what you need without wasting space.
When you are building your project for exporting out of Unity, you use this screen Build Settings, here is the scene that you choose to build, there can he a hierarchy structure for large projects here. There are many additional settings for your projects you can adjust.
You can change the layout of Unity easily by pressing the top right corner, the three dots.
Now let me explain how Unity files work. A unity Project inside a folder, is a collection of files and folders. The main one you look for is assets, inside is where we store folders for fonts, animations, backgrounds, objects, scripts.
Looking at an untouched scene has these objects in it. A light and a camera.
Now- what do we do with Unity?!
There is a lot we can do with Unity!
It is based around objects, everything is an object.
We create a basic empty object by right clicking ,create, empty object.
In the inspector we are able to control the objects.
We can control the objects by adding components here. There are different built in components. You can easily save components where you tweaked the settings to your liking as a preset
We control objects using scripts. Simple as that.
You can drag a script onto an object or go to add component and create a new one.
Open up the scrip in Visual Studio Community or Visual Studio Code these code editors have compatibility with Unity and things that make it much more enjoyable to code with.
A blank c# script can be easily generated in Unity. At the top is what groups of code are needed to reference for the script to work.
If you are using the System in unity in a script, you need to add
using UnityEngine.System to the top of the script.
Next section is start, this is what is called when we start the script. Then is void update, this is what happens or updates every frame. So if we are at 60 frames per second, Whatever code is right here, is UPDATING 60 times per second.
Now here is how the magic works. We go above the start of a script, right here we are going to create a reference to a GameObject, and we call it this, and this semicolon initiates the line of code.
We will now Control-S to save the script in VS code.
Now, using Alt-Tab or Command–Tab, switch over to Unity.
Unity will Automatically sense that the file in the project folder was changed, and will refresh or recompile the project for you!
So we see here that the script is different and we can now go over to this object and drag it in the place holder. We are assigning an object in the inspector. This is a key foundation of Unity.
Going back to The script, we are going to now be able to manipulate this object with code! How cool is that?
We can get different components of Objects and control it with code. We can make Objects appear or disappear.
There is an incredible amount of functionality building up in this program. This is a preliminary walkthrough to get your familiarized with the look of the system and how things can come together.
I hope you learned a lot from this first walkthrough, as in the next episode we are diving in and doing our first project together! See you there.