Setting up Simple Assets
Setting up assets in Unity to learn the basics of asset creation.
We will look at adding simple assets and then adding simple materials, all within Unity. This is not the most common way to make spaces but the easiest.
Unity Primitives
Unity has several basic primitive shapes you can add to a Unity scene.
Cube
Sphere
Capsule
Cylinder
Plane, which has many polygons
Quad, which has very few polygons.
Text - TextMeshPro requires importing assets, which comes up automatically.
Adding Basic Assets
Right-click on a gameobject in the Hierarchy to place the asset under.
Go down to ‘3D Object’ and select the asset you want to add. This way sets the location of the asset in the hierarchy, as all assets need to be a child of the Space, Artifacts, or Portals gameobject.
These assets will already have a collider component attached. Colliders are what a player will run into or stand on. If an asset such as the floor or a wall doesn’t have a collider, the player will either fall through it or can walk through it.
Modifying assets
Position, rotate, and scale assets as needed with the tools at the top left, or the hotkeys W, E, R, T.
Adding Simple Materials
Right-click on the folder in the Project window you would like to add the material to.
Go to ‘Create’, and then ‘Material.’
It is recommended to name your assets as soon as you make them.
Editing the Material settings
Click on the material to see all of its parameters in the Inspector window.
Edit the color, metallic, smoothness sliders as needed.
For transparent materials, you will need to change the ‘Rendering mode’ at the top to ‘Cutout,’ ‘Fade’, or ‘Transparency. Then adjust the Alpha in the color parameter at the bottom. Cutout is the fastest for performance but more limited, whereas 'Transparency' is the slowest for performance, but looks the best.
For Emissive materials, you need to toggle 'Emissive' with the check box. Then adjust the color and intensity. The Bloom effect in Mona will use the Intensity settings. Best effects are between 0-2.
Applying the Material
Apply the material to your asset by either dragging it onto the asset in the space or dragging it onto the asset in the Hierarchy.
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