Unity Tips for Level Design (Quick-Access to Essential Tools)
These are hot keys and tools to navigate with great precision through the scene view when creating level design in 3d, requiring many perspectives to assert position, rotations and scale adjustments.
Shortcuts to make level design easier:
- QWERTY keys
- Scene Camera (Mouse Right-Click + WASD-QE)
- Global/Local
- Center/Pivot
- Vertex-Snap
Let’s take a look at how these elements can create an infinite world by manipulating the assets as tiles. Best practices for working quickly is to select an asset in the hierarchy and manipulate it’s transform through the QWERTY hot keys in the scene view. To do this, select the asset or assets to modify and tap from one key to the other.
To move the camera from the scene view at right angles, this orientation gizmo is essential to change from front to top view.
The ctrl key while adjusting an object’s transform creates a smooth step of quarterly movement. More rigid and precise for tiling perfectly squared things into place. With ctrl + d, duplication is achieved and tiling becomes ever much faster.
Navigate through the scene view by holding down the right-click mouse button, you’ll see an eye for pointer, and use WASD-QE to move around.
First, you can hold the button and move only the mouse as a first-person camera.
Now, translate this camera through the scene, without rotating the mouse-view angle.
WS are the front-to-back axis, AD are the left-to-right while QE goes down-to-up. They act locally on the camera, W always going towards the camera’s view and S zooming out of that view. Working with unity makes level design very fun as many times it feels as if you are a god, flying through your universe at work.
Global vs Local gizmo. Global is great to move objects once you have rotated them appropriately, but sometimes Local works best when rotating objects through their natural axis. Directional Light is something that always feels more intuitive to rotate through its local gizmo.
Center vs Pivot changes the location of the gizmo, giving to angles from where to manipulate the assets.
Vertex-Snapping saves time when co-locating game objects in line. Simply select an object in translation (w) and click “v” when pointing the correct vertex you want to snap, then click on it and pull it towards the other vertex to be snapped to. When V is clicked, the translation gizmo will move with the pointer, click and hold the left mouse button to select the vertex to be moved and dragged it to its end-vertex location.
This hot keys make level design with Unity and Filebase a simple and quick way to creatively build fictitious worlds that are beautiful and organic.
