I’ve used Unity on and off for a couple of months. I love most things about it. But what throws me off is how bad the scene navigation is. It feels so stiff, when comparing to unreal engine for example. Does anybody else who’ve tested both engines, have similar experience?
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Stiff how?
What are you referring to by “scene navigation” and what do you mean by “stiff”?
I agree. It doesn’t seem like an important thing, but being able to navigate fast when you have a complex scene increases productivity a lot.
You guys asking for definition, just go use unreal or basically any 3d app and the difference will be obvious. It’s not just navigation, it’s little quality of life stuff like pre-selection highlight of transform gizmos, stuff like that.
Maybe I just don’t work enough in unity (actually i’ve worked in it more than other game engines, certainly enough to build navigational competency), but I still find basic artist work to be problematic and slow. But I’m not a professional nor do I have that many working hours logged in Unity, so who cares what I think about it really.
But yeah, first impression is Unity could improve a lot in this area. For the artist who works mostly with the mouse and hotkeys which can be reached without moving the hand, Unity lacks polish.
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I believe they’re referring to aiming with the mouse and moving with the keyboard. It definitely feels more klunky compared to the competition.
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I hate hate hate the default scene view camera controls. Compared to Blender or Fusion360 or even Sketchfab it’s horrible.
The difference between dollying the camera forward and zooming the fov is muddled. The near clipping plane often gets fucked up, clipping what you want to view. The wasd “fly” mode is the only way to move around in a level and it has that horrible bad-dream acceleration curve so you have to wait to make progress in a large scene but overshoot your target if you blink. The camera isn’t saved per scene so every fricking canvas is loaded with its back to me, or I am zoomed out to Toledo when I load a small scene after a big level.
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I haven’t clocked so many hours into unity, so I couldn’t exactly put my finger on it, I kind of just felt it to be unintuitive, but I think you hit the nail on the head.
Been a minute since I was inside Unity, but besides what @halley1 mentioned, I know that gizmos are always troublesome to select for me. You grab the wrong handle because they are fussy and laggy and your object goes shooting through space. Not being able to select things precisely and quickly is a killer to productivity when you are trying to move through a lot of things fast or fidget with enviro assets to get a scene just right.
No deselect hotkey. Sheer insanity.
And, this is a question, not a complaint, but is there a hotkey editor? If not, somebody should build one.
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Yes, completely agreed. Some of the things I love about Unity is how modular it is and how it doesn’t have any unnecessary fat. But the navigation is just killing me. I felt more comfortable navigating through an OpenGL scene I created with a few lines of code for keyboard navigation.
Edit → Preferences → Keys might contain what you’re after. I’m not sure it has all of the hotkeys in it, though.
I’ll look into it next time I have some real work to do in the engine. I remember last time I looked up a hotkey for deselect, and it turns out there is actually one, but its a hotkey that basically requires two hands even for me with larger than average hands and besides that, it consistently caused Unity to crash.
Sorry, I don’t mean to shit on Unity – but this is exactly the subject that is my number 1 dislike about the engine.
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Ugh. Looks like the consensus on the deselect hotkey is “write a script”. I know that’s something I tell people to do a lot, but still… that’s not exactly game specific functionality!
So… here you go. Drop the attached file in an “Editor” folder in your project, and then the tilde key (the key to the left of ‘1’) will deselect stuff for you. I was going to make it escape, but that’s not available as a hotkey. It also puts a “Deselect Current” option in the GameObject menu.
Note that testing has been ultra rudimentary, so don’t use it on important stuff without giving it a good thrashing first!
Enjoy. 
3753550–312493–DeselectHotkey.cs (297 Bytes)
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Selecting a item in the scene view broke somewhere in 2017 and is still broken. 99.9% it does not select the object I click on but something behind it
A quick search of the asset store for scene navigation aids turned up the following free editor extension. I haven’t tried it myself, and it’s been on the store for about two years, but the reviews suggest it works with at least Unity 2017.3.
looks like deselect is coming soon though, (screenshot from that 2019 new ui build)
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Its funny how perspectives can be so different. For me this behaviour is much better! When you had a lot of overlapping objects and selecting clicking them could be very difficult. Now if you keep clicking it cycles through all objects at that point.
In Platformer pro which can have a lot of overlapping hitboxes for different attacks, damage, etc, the change was a godsend.
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Stumbled upon a way to handle any key while searching for how to handle screenshots of the inspector. Only works if the scene view is currently active. If you select an object and click elsewhere it stops working but that’s likely easy to find a solution for.
using UnityEditor;
using UnityEngine;
[InitializeOnLoad]
public static class DeselectHotkey
{
static DeselectHotkey()
{
SceneView.onSceneGUIDelegate += DeselectHotkey =>
{
Event e = Event.current;
if (e != null && e.keyCode == KeyCode.Escape)
{
UnityEditor.Selection.activeObject = null;
}
};
}
}
Select objects and press F I find is the best way to quickly move about the scene
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There is no big difference, i find both Unity and Unreal 4 on par about scene usage.
Perhaps because my games does not have thousand objects in the same area.
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I think UE4 also has smoothing, and possibly motion blur in their scene window by default. It certainly does have a nice smooth feel to it.
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