The default scale in Unity is that one Unit equals one meter. But that scale just kind of bugs me because all of my experience uses larger numbers, and working with decimals is a little screwy if your fractions tend to be in twelfths or sixteenths.
My first project with Unity had my character be 5 units tall, and I still try to work at a bit of a larger scale when I can.
I’m just curious how often people try to use Unity at a scale other than one unit to one meter.
Do you use an atypical scale? What scale did you use?
How has that worked for you? Do you have other problems because of this scale? Does something work out out better for using said scale?
The only times I’ve gone with a different scale is when building large worlds and running into floating point precision issues when far from the origin. For a space game as an example I took the scale down to 0.1 on everything so I could effectively get a much larger area to place far out star systems. Seemed to work fine when testing, but I really wanted more space and wish Unity would just switch to using doubles. I’ve backburnered the project while I work on another.
When I started the project I didn’t follow the 1m = 1 unity rule. Right now I’m using 15 units = 1m
The downside is :
values for some settings must be deviated from the default settings (gravity, light baking resolution, occluder sizes, camera clipping planes). The default values all assume 1m = 1 unit.
The other downside of deviating is you can end up not enough resolution due to floating point precision if you have a large open world scene. Example using the 1m = 1 unit rule: to the nearest millimeter of accuracy you can have this maximum value 9,999.999 (which is about 10 km). Now, if you use a 10m = 1 unit scale, then you are left with a maximum value of 999.9999 to the nearest millimeter. Now the maximum size of the word has shrunk to 1 km without running into issues. So you need to keep that in mind. This thread demonstrates the problem: Problem with shaking Object or Camera! http://davenewson.com/posts/2013/unity-coordinates-and-scales.html
Also, if you buy assets on the asset store, most likely then will have been configured to the 1m = 1 unit rule.
But like you mentioned, I got used to the way that I’m doing it because I can dealing with whole numbers a lot of the time when placing items in a small scene or when coding I can deal with whole number floats.
But if I had to do it over from the beginning I would strongly stick to 1m = 1 unit rule so one doesn’t have to be concerned with the above issues.
Wow, I can’t even fathom trying to cram 15 meters into one unit. It just rubs me the wrong way.
(Except for that spaceship game Joe-Censored mentioned. It makes more sense there because you’re working with larger objects.)
Since I’ve spent so much time with older engines where a default pixel size is one unit, I have this expectation that a person should be 55, 70, even close to 200 units tall. And as technology and games have grown, the objects usually get bigger too. I subconsciously expect something closer to 1 unit = 1 cm.
For my next project, I was thinking about scaling everything to 1 uu = 1 foot. It’s technically more work to scale all the gravity and lighting settings than it would be to simply adjust some scale in my 3D modelling software, but it just feels more comfortable to be to use when all the objects are bigger.
