Search Unity

Editor Extensions which will optimize your workflow!

March 7, 2011 in Games | 3 min. read
UnityMixamo002
UnityMixamo002
Share

Is this article helpful for you?

Thank you for your feedback!

UnityMixamo001fs

UnityMixamo002

As you may know, the Unity editor environment is at its core incredibly extensible.  An over-arching part of the design philosophy is to allow and encourage talented developers to create new features, integrated at a level deeper than the simple plug-in architecture you find in other software.  Editor extensions can sit so tightly and integrate so directly in the environment that you might think they were new features in the tool from our own internal development team. I’m not just saying that—see for yourself! We have two new Editor Extensions in the Unity Asset Store which both radically change the Unity workflow and exemplify the power of Unity’s plug-in architecture.

First, the Mixamo Animation store plugin, which allows you to procedurally animate your character inside Unity, within minutes!  Once you’e downloaded the free plugin, you’ll find a new Mixamo pane under the Window menu item.  Drag your rigged model from the Project Pane into the Mixamo window and go through a quick retargeting process.  Once that’s in place, you can browse Mixamo’s enormous animation archive right in Unity.  Press preview and watch the animation play on your character directly in the Unity editor!  With a few sliders you can adjust various animation parameters, so that your animation perfectly suits your character’s body—no hands penetrating the head, for example.  You can make a walk surly and aggressive, or fine tune it to a quirky jog.  This is the kind of thing I myself, as an armchair animator, have slaved over in Motionbuilder for my own game.  Those days are over!  Cut your animation budget and schedule dramatically with this revolutionary new tool.  Mixamo has put up a how-to video if you'd like to get a head start.

As much of a paradigm shift as the Mixamo plug-in, the ingenious Playmaker Visual Logic editor has arrived to change the way you code!  This kind of editor is something I’ve personally wanted in our product for some time—and in true Asset Store rock star form, Huton Games beat us to it!  With Playmaker, you can visually script game logic using nodes, transition events, and access to nearly the entire Unity API  in an elegant finite state machine.

blog1_playmakerTitle

You can literally program without… er.. programming?  From simple trigger-based events to extremely complex and sophisticated gameplay behavior, you can do it with Playmaker.  Since you can augment its library of methods and actions with your own standard Unity scripts,  you can pretty much do anything with it!

blog1_playmakerGraph

Playmaker revolutionizes how you program.  Mixamo, how you animate.  Both of these new extensions offer so many powerful new features that it would practically warrant a new version number for Unity, if we had created them ourselves.  They’re here to save you time and offer you great flexibility.   To take advantage of this new power, launch the Unity Editor.  You’ll find the Asset Store listed under the Window menu.

You’ll not only find editor extensions like Playmaker and Mixamo, you’ll also find (*deep breath*) racing cars, aircraft carriers, MMO networking templates, grand pianos, animated cats, rats, wolves and horses, water buoyancy simulation systems, electronic magazines, zombies, goblins, PHP scripts, social media integration APIs, toilets, terrain tools, web serialization kits, asset bundle management tools, dragons, node-based shader editors, c# programming tutorials, Javascript to c# converters, dungeon templates, rifles, explosion and particle collections, pathfinding systems, Baroque French bath tubs and a heck of a lot more.

March 7, 2011 in Games | 3 min. read

Is this article helpful for you?

Thank you for your feedback!