Unity wants your feedback on usability and artist workflows!

News & General Discussion
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Dear Unity Community,

Calling all artists and designers! We are starting a user research study on how we can improve the editor usability and artist workflows. Our goal is to have you, the users, help us identify where we are not solving your problems or meeting your expectations.

So if you have that burning issue that’s been bugging you forever, that workflow you just wish was simpler, or that laundry list of things you wish Unity supported, now is your chance to air these to the team!

We look forward to hearing from you and will be quite active in this thread to involve each of you in the feedback loop.

Thank you,
The UX Team

EDIT: Having so many of you active on this thread and giving us tons of feedback is really great! We are working hard to collect and organize all of them. Now we wish to take a step further and directly talk to some of you about all the things that make your life in Unity harder.

If you want to guide us through your feedback in more details, or if you feel like there are more things you would like to talk about, you can speak directly to us. Just complete the short survey here and we will get in touch with you for a chat on Skype or in person if you are somewhere around us. A session will likely last between 45 minutes to 1 hour and is conducted in English.

We look forward to meeting you!

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Be able to set default states for import properties, like “Import Materials”

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this as default feature.

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have the terrain component remember the last selected tool, and last selected paint object/tree and brush size. same for texture painting, last selected texture, brush and brush size.

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One minor thing that drives me insane, is unitys lack of support for grayscale textures. if you export a texture from substance designer and its a grayscale image. it won’t import into unity, you then have to add a gradient map node to convert it to a color image so that unity will import it.

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How about - when I drag a bunch of things from the Project panel to the Inspector panel and drop it into an array or list, they stay in the order they were listed in the Project panel.

What happens right now is that they get shuffled into some bizzaro order. The solution is to drag items one by one from the Project panel into the Inspector panel.

I have spent 100s of hours doing this.

I have to do this on every project. Every time I need an array of pictures or a list of files I spend HOURS dragging each item carefully from the Project panel to the Inspector panel.

Sometimes the Inspector panel doesn’t accept the drag. Sometimes it drops into a prior slot. So I have to drag them SLOWLY.

This is the biggest bottleneck on every Unity project I have worked on. You guys have had 5.6 versions to unscrew this insanity. If it carries on I might be a liability at the next Unity event. I’m ready to go postal over this.

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Allow us to change the font and text size of all text in the UI. People have been asking for this for years.

See: How to change font size in unity editor? - Unity Engine - Unity Discussions

It’s been asked for since 2012 and it’s been on the roadmap apparently since 2014.

It’s 2017…

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Animation blending could use some work. Right now upperbody and fullbody animations in Unity don’t blend very well, resulting in a lot of manual work. I would love it if you guys could figure out a better/easier solution.

Overall Unity is one of the most fun engines I’ve ever worked with. It’s very userfriendly, which is great.

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The ability to untick ‘Include Script Dependencies’ when exporting unitypackages would be great.

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Adding a script to Script Execution Order should have the same dialogue window as Add Component. Right now it’s one huge uncollapsed list.

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Things that are missing so bad for better in editor work and level design are:

MOST IMPORTANT:

  1. New and modern terrain (Landscape + Vegetation) system - the current one does not even support UNDO when changing properties, random rotations for trees, holes in terrain or pushing patches under sea level → it is mandatory adding new terrain system ! Painting on objects using the vegetation system should be possible as well !

  2. Better way of re-grouping and managing objects in hierarchy - there is no simple way to move up and down in the hierarchy window if you want to drag some object into some group… using the mouse scroller to scroll up and down is the simplest thing you can add. Much better would be to improve the hierarchy window - refer to CryEngine and 3ds Max’s layer systems - to easy hide, lock/unlock rename etc. groups… Will be good if we can add objects into hierarchy layer instead of an empty game object in order to be able to collapse the group. This is a “must have” feature. Here is an example: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/28577

  3. Node based shader tool is a must have tool as well.

  4. Adding default vertex paint tool and shaders to blend multiple materials and textures

  5. Ocean system

  6. Flock system

  7. Roads and rivers tool - probably could be part of a new terrain system

  8. Spline tool - to be able to extrude objects along splines or instantiate objects along it as well (e.g. creating fences, walls, roads, or sequence of objects)

  9. Add “Copy object’s real path location” to the right mouse button menu in the Project window. For example, this way we can very fast open an image in image editor or fbx file in 3D package instead of having to navigate and search for the file.

  10. Make animation clips in FBX import settings reorderable - this is useful when you add more animations to a 3D model but want to reorder them by type

The asset store has most of these packages - but adding more and more tools into a project makes it heavier and difficult to browse !!!

Hope adding these features is possible and they will come at some point…!!!
Thanks !

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I’m not sure if all of my needs are what you’re asking for, and I have so many - but I’ll list them if I think they might be related.

I’ve always been frustrated with navigating menus to toggle settings, and often losing focus to those windows (partially my fault for not locking them) and having to navigate the menus again. Moving them to a top-right dropdown menu would save so much time. Maybe making them a new Inspector tab when you open them would also go a long way to solving this issue.

I’d also like to jump on the: providing default import settings to modify (in GUI). If you can think of a way to consolidate materials that are exactly the same but are separately generated this could be a helpful tool related to import issues.

A better Console. The improvements to be made in this area are vast, and can be partially found in multiple asset-store purchases. Making it more obvious when errors are toggled/collapsed would be an important part of this!

An in-engine whiteboxing tool. Almost very person working with Unity finds out very quickly that working with cubes/planes/etc is almost useless, and there’s little to no options apart from learning 3D modelling. An inbuilt CSG tool would do so much for level design pipelines and a whole load of filler modelling convenience.

Better grids and grid-snapping. There’s only one axis of grids, at one height, and you can’t snap to them, only intervals. They don’t really have much of a point other than to give the Scene View some perspective.

It’d also be nice to have a pie menu of some kind to transition between top-left-front-perspective-etc to skip having to click and axis and the perspective/orthog toggle. Having some memory of what perspective you came from would be crucial to making this toggle work fluidly. Perhaps a bookmarking system for the Scene View could be implemented.

Collapse the UnityEvent GUI down to a minimum when the list is empty. I need myself some more screen real-estate!

A way to easily create an empty zeroed GameObject parent to group other GameObjects (CTRL-G may be unused, could even use CTRL-SHIFT-N when multi-selected?)

Multi-axis scaling in the Scale tool. Currently using the rect-transform tool as a workaround.

In relation to the suggestion of fixing the animation search, it’d also be handy to fix the issue more globally.
It’d be nice to additionally include MainAssets containing SubAssets of type in a search (only showing the MainAsset and relevant SubAssets), plus showing the MainAsset related to the SubAssets returned by a search.
This way you’d fix searching for Meshes with silly names (eg. polycube5) by searching for the Model (MainAsset) instead, and also filtering the many similarly named SubAssets returned by a search by being able to see their associated MainAsset.
(Bit of a tautology but hopefully it explains my reasoning)

I may edit more into this post later if I remember.

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A quick native way to reset Position, Rotation and Scale to 0. Something like what this script does.
3045983--228351--Unity_2017-04-25_14-52-52.png

Edit: I’m aware of these options in the transform component context menu, but they’re too slow to use

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The right-click menu has all of these if you were not aware. Not as quick as buttons but not too bad.
It’d be handy to be able to reset them by right-clicking on the variable titles instead of finding them in the component-level dropdown.

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Incremental moving, rotation and scaling of objects with custom increments would help a ton when working on a custom grid. Also, I echo the need for a better snapping system.

A system for automatically packing separate Metallic and Roughness maps into a single Metallic/Smoothness texture would be nice. I find myself often having to fiddle with external software to pack my textures for Unity importing. It’d also be nice to have a version of the Standard shader that doesn’t use these packed maps, and instead would let us specify a roughness map and a metallic map separately.

Also a vertex painting tool is pretty essential.

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The biggest things for me would be:

  • a node-based material editor (that still allows us to edit/write shader code)
  • a dedicated window for editing prefabs instead of having to put them in a scene
  • a dedicated window for editing particle systems
  • automatic convex decomposition
  • editor-only “folders” and “tags” for the scene hierarchy, allowing us to better organize our gameObjects. Doing this via Transform hierarchies is costly for no good reason. And it would have to come with a proper API too, so that when I spawn a bullet in play mode, I can put it directly under the “Bullets” folder

For the two “dedicated window” points, it’d be great if you could save presets for lighting setups and skyboxes. Maybe even just drag and drop scenes in a list, and those scenes will act as your presets and be loaded when you edit your prefab

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A really useful feature wood be a quicker way to edit the Settings. I think of a special Inspector Panel (like Services) that can be part of the UI the whole time.

Also the Splash Screen settings are somewhat confusing. Some things happen magically, but aren’t documented (like automatic resizing), some things are just trial and error (VR Splash).

2 Likes
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I don’t know if repeating things already said is something the Unity staff is looking for… I’ve seen some pretty cool suggestions before my post here.
I won’t relist them all…

For me, the ability to change the colour of the Editor would be a huge help. I realize this is a Pro feature.
Honestly, I haven’t paid a cent to Unity, but I have tried (recently) to give back in terms of assisting people as best I can.
On a personal note, I play around with Unity for fun. Changing the colour of the editor is such a simple, but very “helpful?” thing… boggles my mind. :slight_smile:

I agree and hope for some in-engine art tools: Be it terrain, or 3d modelling (anything beyond what’s avail. now), and node shaders, as several others have suggested.

On and 1 note (for coders, designer, whatever): An option to choose for a Screen Canvas, that something stays on the screen, no matter if the window changes size or not… Not sure if this falls into the wish list of what’s being asked, but I think people could appreciate that.
I wanted to elaborate on this: I meant this about a UI when you’re running a game. It’s certainly not at all common to have UI elements disappear from the screen, in any app, or game I’ve ever played… :slight_smile:

Unity is awesome. Look forward to seeing what comes of this ‘research’ =)

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This part of your request exists under Edit>Snap Settings and used by holding CTRL.

Reminds me… Multi-Axis scaling in the Scale tool. Not having to use the rect-transform tool as some kind of hacky workaround!

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While i agree that it’s very time consuming and a very boring task to add multiple things to an array in the inspector, you could extend the inspector, so you can give just one file and it would grab all files in the same folder and put them into the array.
I don’t know any specifics about the hierarchy you’re working with, but it’s just a suggestion to a very repetitive task.

Me for example, i have a lot of animations, and sometimes i need to change things, or add new ones or remove old ones. So i just update all the animations in the animation component through script. No need to do it manually.
You could do it the same way with the textures maybe. If you know what and where, then you can do it with a simple script.

It would be nice if Unity did something to ease the repetitive task of adding multiple things to an array without extending inspectors.

3 Likes