Lesson 3: Exploring Unity Interface

Lesson 3 Video Transcript

Hey there everyone. Welcome to another Unity tutorial. In this lesson, we’re going to be setting the scene and exploring the editor.

Now that we have Unity Open, this is the default view, so we’re just going to go through and kind of look at the most important windows and features that we need to familiarize ourselves with by kind of learning the terms, and the names for these windows. It’ll make all of the other tutorials make a lot of sense.

First things first, all of these tabs that you see around are windows in Unity and they can be dragged around. Resized is necessary and you can pull them out and have them standalone like this is its own window now, or you can mix ’em in other places.

I’m going to set up Unity just a little bit and I recommend you do it as well if you ever want to revert the layout back to normal.

(00:53)
For instance, I’ll just move this over here. If you wanted to revert it back to normal, you can click any of these layouts and you can save the layout yourself once you have found that you like your arrangement. So I’ll put it back to default really quickly and now I will just rearrange it a little bit.

So I’m going to put the hierarchy over here. The hierarchy tab basically contains all of the objects in your scene and what that means is right now it’s a whole lot of nothing because the scene is brand new, but you start with a camera and a directional light, and we did the three D preset, which means that having lighting and a perspective camera is really important for now.

That’s the hierarchy tab, and that’s basically just everything that is currently going to appear when you press play in Unity.

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Down here we have the project and the console tabs. The console is where messages, warnings, and errors get logged. So if something’s not quite working, you can check it out in this tab while you’re testing.

And the project is where all your files are and this structure is emulated directly from your actual Windows Explorer folder structure. Something I like to do is actually zoom out of this view.

So if we had a couple of other items, let’s add another folder now so you can right-click to create, and then you have a lot of options. We’re just going to add a folder. We’ll call this one art for now.

We’re not going to put anything in it. You can zoom out right here or control the mouse wheel. So I’m going to do that version and you end up getting them in a list of you, which I prefer personally.

(02:42)
Now that we have this kind of project thing out of the way, we’re not going to set up anything else in it right now. Instead, I want to just move a couple more windows around.

So we have the game window, which as you can see when I press play, we’re going to move from the scene to the game automatically. The scene view is something where we can fly around and we could take an object like this camera and we can move it around, but the game view is what a player basically would see.

They don’t have the option to just move our objects around like a developer. They would just get this view and I think it’s valuable personally to have both at the same time.

So I like to put the game view right here. Now before we exit play mode, one other thing I want to show is that since we have the camera selected, which could be done as I clicked on it here, or by clicking on the object in the hierarchy, the inspector, this window over here will show us information about the camera.

(03:49)
It would also show us information about the directional light. And if you’re completely new to Unity, this can be an overwhelming amount of information, but basically, all you need to know is that every object, they’re called game objects. Each one has a transform component which has its position, rotation, and scale, as well as any other components you want to add.

So the camera has a camera component as well as an audio listener. So that sound effects that are playing around the camera will work. We’re going to minimize this camera view for right now. We’re going to collapse it and we’re going to just mess with the position.

So if I use these arrows here, you can see the position changes up on the top right, or I can directly manipulate it right here. So I’m going to bring it to negative, I dunno, 300 something, and now I’m going to exit play mode.

(04:43)
And as you can see, it returns to where it started before we entered play mode. And that’s just a nice thing about Unity.

So when you’re actually editing and testing at the same time when you’re in play mode, any change that you make in the scene itself will revert back to the exact state it was in before you pressed play. That’s for the transform component, and that’s for the camera component.

If we change something like this, it would revert back. So we can directly edit things in the transform component, like the position, we can just write in 10 or we can click and drag over on the side of it.

If you start here, you can drag it as much as you want. If you hit the edge of your monitor, it will automatically loop to the other end. If you do control Z, of course, you can undo your changes.

(05:30)
So I’ll put it back there.

And the other way that you can edit the data for the transform component is with Unity like tools up here. So you have the move tool, rotate tool, scale tool, and quite a few more for things like UI and even more than that.

For right now we’re just looking at the position rotation and scale. So if we wanted to change the position, that’s what it’s on by default.

So I click on the camera. I could also press W to bring these arrows up and I can move it around. I could press E, which gives me this arc ball, which lets me rotate.

So I can click on an axis and rotate it, and you can kind of see the camera is rotating in this view over here, and you can rotate it in other directions as well, or even click anywhere on this arc ball and rotate it like you were rotating the ball, which can be very disorienting, but it is possible.

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And then you have the scale tool, which is accessible up here or with R on the keyboard, and you can scale it along an axis or the entire object itself. Since it’s a camera, the scale doesn’t do much.

So let’s add an object to the scene that we can see the scale of. We can create it through a number of methods, but we’re going to just right click in the hierarchy and create a 3D object.

We’re going to make a cube, so with the cube, we can press W to bring up the arrows, and we’re just going to move it so it kind of appears in the camera’s view.

You can see it down here. So we have the cube. I’m going to press E to bring up the arc ball again and just kind of rotate it randomly. That looks good.

Now I’m going to press R, and I can do it on this axis with the red line here. I can do it on this Y axis or I can do it on the blue axis. I think that’s z, and I could do all of them at once to just scale up the end entire shape.

(07:31)
For now. That’s basically everything that I wanted to cover for just looking at Unity and kind of seeing how we can edit data, and add objects. The only thing left is to press control S just to save the scene.

As you see, if I change something in the scene, it will get this little asterisk and then I can press control S to save it. If I go to the scene itself, the sample scene, I can press control D to duplicate it, let’s just rename it.

You can right-click and do a rename, which is up here, or you can just press F two and I’ll just call it other scene.

If I double-click it, it’ll appear up here. So if I double click, now we’re in the other scene, I’ll delete the cube by clicking on it and then pressing the delete key.

(08:23)
So in the other scene, the cube is not there, so you can kind of see switching between the scenes. They’re just two different rooms where the objects that we’ve set up are arranged differently and they don’t necessarily have the same objects.

You can kind of picture this being level one or level two where you have different levels arranged in the scenes, and then you can just switch between them. That’s basically everything for right now. You can feel free to explore things like in file, how you can save and open projects, edit.

There are a lot of options in here like project settings and preferences, and if you’re ever missing any of these windows, you can usually find them somewhere in the window tab with general.

And another pretty important one would be things like animation. It’s good to know that all the windows can be reopened through here, or again, by resetting your layout up here.

(09:18)
But yeah, that’s everything for this episode. It can be kind of a lot, but I just wanted to kind of introduce these ideas to you, and as we go through the rest of the tutorials, this kind of stuff will just come supernaturally.

I’ll always try to remind you guys what the keyboard shortcuts are as well, because I’m super used to them, but I know not everyone will be used to them if they’re new to the editor.

But yeah, thank you, guys, for watching this one. In the next one, we’re going to actually create our first script on a game object and see our code work in play mode.