Introduction to Unity

In this lesson we're going to explore Unity interface. OK, so the purpose of this lesson is just to give you an overview of the interface itself. Throughout this project in our course, we're actually going to be exploring all of these different interfaces in depth as we go. So we're taking a hands-on approach to this. So instead of going through and telling you what File does and everything in it, we're going to get right into it. We're going to get out hands dirty and learn that way. So before we do that, what I want to do is just give you a little bit of terminology. So whenever I say I'm going to be moving over to the Menu Bar, you'll know where I'm talking about and what we're going to be doing in that area. So with that said, let's go right up to the Menu Bar here at the top. And the Menu Bar holds a lot of different functions. If we want to create something, chances are the Menu Bar is where you want to go to actually create that. So, for example, if we wanted to create a game object, we could do Game Object, Create Other. And I can bring in a cube or a sphere, a primitive like that. We also have, basically, the basics, as well. We have things like your Open Scene and Save Scene, that sort of thing. We've already talked about those just a little bit. And if we wanted to go even further, if you want to learn how to create terrain, this is where you're going to find that terrain. It's simple as that-- Create Terrain. And it's going to pop right into your scene there. So with that said, that's the Menu Bar. And like I said, we're going to get into that a little bit more as we go throughout this project. Now the next section that I want to talk about is called the Toolbar. The Toolbar is pretty simple. We have things like our Transformation tool, so we have Move, Rotate, and Scale. If you're used to 3D at all, this is going to be very, very familiar to you. And we also have the Hand Tool. And this is going to help us navigate inside of Unity. Now we have things like our toggles to help in our transformation. So we can do things like moving along the center. Or we can move along the pivot point. And then we have things like moving a rotating in a global axis or the local axis. We have Play, Pause, and Step. And this is really just going to allow us to go ahead and play test inside of our level. So if I hit play, it's going to go right into my game view, and I can actually play my level. Now we have a couple of drop-down windows here to where we can actually access layers. And we can put things on layers and make new layers. And then we have this drop-down box which actually allows us to customize or use a predetermined layout inside of Unity. So right now we're actually using the wide layout. If I wanted to switch it over to a four split or a tall, I could do that. And it would actually just change my layout altogether. Now, the next part that we have is called our Inspector. And the Inspector is basically where all of our information is held on a specific object that we have selected in our scene. So I've got this object selected. And you can see all of my information about that specific object. So I have my transform information. I have some things about the mesh itself. I have the Mesh Render, how it's going to render. Is it going to cast shadows? Is it going to receive shadows? What kind of materials is on it? I have an animation section on this, as well. Now, I don't actually have an animation on this object. As you can see, there's no animation clip associated to this, but that is available. I have a Collider. We're going to get into those later on in this course. And then I even have a material that I can adjust here. So we're going to get into materials, as well. So the Inspector we're going to spend a lot of time on. And this is how we can really set off every single object that we have in our scene. So I think you have a good idea of what the Inspector is, so let's go ahead and move on to the project view. Now the project view I've already touched on just a little bit. But I want to go ahead and just recap that. The project view is where all of your assets, everything that's going to be in your game, is going to be held in your Project folder. So all of your meshes, all of your scenes, all of your audio, all of your animations, any textures that you have, any materials that you have, those are all going to be held in the Project folder. Now the Project folder is best described as a staging area because this is where all the files are being held, and they're waiting to be tossed into the scene here. Now once they're actually tossed into the scene here, like everything is here, it's brought over into our hierarchy view. Now the hierarchy view is the place where we can actually use it to select objects very, very quickly. So, for example, I have all of these actually grouped together. So if I wanted to select all my lights, I could just click on Lights, and it selects all of those. And, again, the hierarchy is all of your objects that are actually in the scene itself. So this is a great way to select. It's a great way to group objects together. So we're going to get into that more in depth as we go throughout this project. Now, the last section that I want to talk about is the actual scene view. And this is where we're actually going to be working 90% of the time. We're going to be moving objects around, lining up pieces for our level, adding in some details and lights and audio. And we're going to be even play testing in our game view, not necessarily our scene view, but in our game view. But it will still show up in the same area. So if I switch over to the Game View, you'll see that this switches. And it jumps to a camera that's actually in my scene. And this is my first-person camera here. So let's go back over to the Scene tab there or the Scene view. So we have a lot of information that I've given out to you. And it's just a basic overview of the different places because whenever we get into this project, I just want you to know wear I'm at whenever I say, OK, let's go over to the Scene View, or let's go over to the Inspector. So I just really feel like that's going to be helpful for you as we go throughout this project. So in our next lesson, what we're going to do is actually get into navigating inside of our scene view, as well as actually customizing our layout that best works for our specific project they we're working on.