What are some cool hidden "features" of unity?

News & General Discussion
1

I just found that I can create my own terrain brushes by creating a folder in my project called “Gizmos” and add .pngs for brushes. Sorry that i’m behind on this.

What other hidden cool features are there in Unity3D?

2

Hm…

Well, I actually didn’t know that light mapping existed for a long time believe it or not. I guess that was an awesome hidden feature for me at the time.

3

Editor scripting could be considered a “hidden” feature. It’s far from hidden, but it’s probably not something which jumps out at new users. You just learn the interface and make your game. The day you learn that you can make your own interfaces and add your own tools is the day that Unity becomes a lot more powerful than you ever realized.

4

webcamtexture is pretty cool considering it works in free version of unity. Can wrap your webcam feed to a cube or other object as a material.

You can also loop through the pixels of the texture(each frame) for pixels meeting a criteria and get the x, y position on the actual texture rather than the screen. Could be cool for generating a procedural level from a snapshot/photo or something (like an image of the night sky and create an object at each star found that you can click on to load a level or something).

Also packtextures is pretty cool.

5

Yea I have some experience with Editor Scripting. I’ve been trying to make a couple add-ons for myself.

6

I noticed this on the scripting overview. Looked quite interesting. I wonder if its’ possible to have a normal video stream. Might be too bandwidth intensive.

7

My favourite hidden feature in Unity is the Semantic Game Builder Interface.

(either that or a few of those extremely useful functions that have little to no documentation, but have been figured out by helpful forum members)

8

Ahaha hey it’s not April first anymore :smile:

My favorite hidden feature are probably Unity 4 Property Drawers - not really hidden, but somehow obscured

9

I think this qualifies as hidden as I don’t think it’s documented anywhere:

If you give a MeshRenderer more materials than the mesh has submeshes (i.e. you have a mesh with only 1 submesh but you assign 3 materials) then the last submesh gets re-rendered for every additional material. You can use this to do some multi-pass effects. On the flipside, if you’re not careful you can also end up rendering many extra polygons by accident…

10

This one:

[RPC]
void ReturnData (NetworkMessageInfo info)
	{
	byte[] Data = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(myData);
	networkView.RPC("ReceiveData", info.sender, Data);
	}
11

Wow i have not seen this, thanks!

12

Thanks, hadn’t noticed this :slight_smile:

These features are also really cool!
1224867--50953--$Unity Feature.PNG
I especially like the “Feature 43 Pro” because of it’s great value for money.
Unity store looked like this one time…:face_with_spiral_eyes:

13

I’m using this feature with my planar shadows system (to dynamically add shadows without touching the main materials). The downside of this is that if your mesh have multiple materials mapped with different UVs, your extra material will only get applied to the last or fist UVs set (i don’t remember which one). Would be awesome to get access to those parts and apply the material using the UVs we want. :roll_eyes: