Not sure if this has been mentioned or not, but I’d love to be able to create multiple prefabs at once with drag and drop game object to project folder.
3 Likes
@Antony-Blackett +1 on this. Would be a huge time saver for asset makers.
Some suggestions of my own:
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As someone making extensive VFX packs on the store, I hope you’ll bring back multi particle editing in the Project folder. If not, please let me drop my prefabs into the scene and edit multiple of them in the Hierarchy and click “Apply Changes to Prefab(s)” like it was back in ~2017.4. This would save me thousands of clicks.
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Would be great having a better save/load function in the Gradient Editor and have expandable folders or categories for different projects. Maybe it could be useful saving gradient libraries in the project folder as well.
For those that have big libraries, changing the size/width of the gradient presets would be nice too.
@willgoldstone
Thank you for this thread.
I have a pain point with the editor and the extremely narrow pixel range to select the vertical scroll bar. I feel like I have 5 pixels worth of space to select it before accidentally selecting somethign else. Video to show what I mean
Is anyone else experiencing this? 
I’m on Unity 2019.3.14f1
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Hey all I just wanted to chime in and thank you for regularly contributing to workflow improvement suggestions here. We are working on a lot of what you’re discussing - especially around making the editor and scene view more the focus of your work in a smart way. So please, keep it up and I hope you’re all doing well in the current climate, appreciate you!
6 Likes
Yes! We have some exciting stuff coming up. I know everything seems to take much too long … but we (Scene Tooling) will have some really powerful workflow changes landing for 2021.1. Taking the time to do these right.
Planning to create a video detailing this soon. It’s big-picture, workflow-level stuff. Not features. Will share 
8 Likes
Great to hear things are moving in the direction of improved workflow, thanks for that
There are a couple things that I have as high priority.
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I would love an other view almost the same as the project view but with only references to the project items, That I can sort all I want, without affecting how its stored on the disk. with Smart folders etc.
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The ability to adjust the preview window for objects, right now they are almost all the time too dark. ( change the background to user color and the lighting )
- Fullscreen in Play-mode. ( no overlays nothing just a fullscreen window )
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“Smart Folders” are one my top priorities. The great thing is, a core team is nearly finished with the underlying system (super fast indexing and searching, allowing complex dynamic folders). Next step is creating a solid front end system. Easy, I’m sure. 
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I’m hoping you’re looking more at “Smart Prefabs” rather than just “Smart Folders”.
Depends on what you’re going for.
For example, if you’re really looking at doing “Smart Folders” in a “Smart” way, I would seriously focus on the badass “Variants” concept of prefabs (to reduce the number of visible options to users at any moment). This gets in the way with most large projects with a huge number of assets (variants of rocks/trees etc.), and it in no way is “fun” to work with.
Try something like this instead:
This would put the currently-selected option as the icon to “click” and reopen it to whatever “page” the selected option is currently on. Ideally, this would only show actual “variants” of the prefab, and encourage a “variant-based” workflow in the editor overall – which is A LOT more compatible with a DOTS-only (read: data-driven) project workflow going forward.
Hopefully this would be rolled-into a nice “grouping” option to let users make collections of different assets (preferably automatically – i.e. if you have a naming convention, use that convention to automatically “group” many prefabs / assets / parts into named collections instantly, perhaps with a tiny popup letting you name the collection.)
Also, ideally, you should be able to right-click and instantly remove an asset/prefab from ALL collections (and delete any collections that have 0 entries during the asset removal process to “clean-up” your project as you go – this “removal from collection” process can quickly get out of hand when adding/removing assets from many collections at once – especially when doing this in bulk, such as when purchasing from the asset store and removing huge parts of it upon importing into your project). A “Remove from all Collections” feature is something Blender doesn’t have in its collections menu (but is something that it sorely needs, assuming the goal of assets is to get them into a scene/level as quickly and as frictionlessly as possible, which includes searching/sorting/adding/removing from different dependencies on the asset’s data, which should be part of the whole purpose of a “Smart Folder” anyway – in my opinion).
One more thing – expanding on the grid-based variant idea above, have you thought about doing some sort of grid-based thing like this in the Project view (to further consolidate space)? (See middle “Project” dropdown near “Drag/Drop from here”):
The idea is to give a small-ish grid of prefab icons that you can mouseover and see more detail (like with a magnifier window outside the box or near the mouse cursor, showing name, higher-res icon) when a folder is full of prefabs and variants). The prefabs would be displayed in a similar manner as the previous concept (albeit with smaller thumbnails), but the click menu would popup as normal to display the variants just like the above-most concept.
Granted, folders should be able to do other things (based on what kinds of assets they contain), but finding prefabs (and their variants) in a compact, extremely visual way should definitely be considered a MAJOR part of the Unity workflow – especially for designers.
Remember:
So as many of the extraneous panels as possible need to be removed/consolidated (i.e. into compact or context-sensitive versions).
Prefabs are a great place to start, since they’re essentially like a “DOTS-object”, and they should be treated as such. They’re just data, and you can do ANYTHING with them, including “drill-downs” of data. However, above all-else, they should still be tucked-away in discreet “dots” (for lack of a ‘better’ term?) until they are needed, since your project is likely to contain A LOT of these “dots” of data. They need to be represented a LOT better visually, and as such, they need both a compact and expanded form.
Just my two-cents. Take it or leave it.
1 Like
^ Yes floating pallets would be good to have
And I like to see the thumbnails with better visibility, they are too dark right now for most of my prefabs
Current too dark colors;
Suggested fix:
4 Likes
Couldn’t agree more. You can use your keyboard to go directly to a letter but if you’re looking for something that is somewhere in a sub category of a sub category, you can spend five minutes in this.
These UX shouldn’t exist anymore and should have a search function like we have to add component in the inspector.
1 Like
@willgoldstone @gabrielw_unity
I made another video for resizing frames. It’s inaccurate basically. If I select from below I can’t resize, if I select from above, I can .
- Windows 7 64bit
- Unity 2019.3.14f1
1 Like
I have definitely also run into that. It’s little things like this that can drive you batty over time.
I have several things that would make using he inspector easier for me.
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Sticky the header of a component to the top that is being cut off when scrolling down. Imo, it adds nice context to what you are looking at, even more so for large components like the Cinemachine Camera. Did a quick mock-up. (I actually tried to do it in editor, but even with reflection it is not possible
)
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Make expanding/collapsing components per GameObject, instead of global. Maybe a shortcut(like holding shift) or context menu item to expand/collapse globally.
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Add buttons to expand/collapse all components on the object. I know that there is the menu option for it. But I honestly always forget that they are there, and when I do, it just feels inconvenient to me.
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Add a bar at the top that would have a list of all the components. Maybe their icons, or maybe as a drop down. That you could click, and instantly scroll to, and expand that component. Maybe option to collapse all other components.
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Not quite as sure if this one is needed if you have the others. But a search bar stuck to the top for searching for a component.
I think these would make navigating and using the inspector quicker, and easier.
4 Likes
I like that cartoon outline and bright BG for most “drag/drop” cases, but sometimes you have white/bright elements (i.e. UI / UX controls, clouds, white/gray level elements, etc.) and you need to see them too. Your “white” elements are well-textured, but lowpoly-styled or cartoon-styled assets might not be as clear. A dark BG actually helps in this case.
As a potential alternative:
@ :
When generating icons/thumbs:
Unity should generate a temporary HISTOGRAM alongside the default icon (to later check a Grayscale Version of the Thumbnail with the default gray). If necessary, perhaps in a second-pass when viewing the asset for the first time, or when the application is idle, so it may check the brightness of the center-most area of a generated thumbnail against the default gray background (edges of the thumbnail), then, if necessary (i.e. a user selects a high/low brightness range or color gradient), Unity automatically selects a more appropriate shade of gray for the subject in the center of the icon (i.e. using three shades, minimum – one as default thumbnail bg color). This happens when the brightness levels are too low/high across the image using the default (initially-selected) gray (i.e. when there’s not enough contrast). A secondary background “color” selection would be made according to the histogram/grayscale version of the original thumbnail generation as a second-pass only if that first thumbnail fails to reach the levels of contrast in the histogram (specified by the user in the editor preferences).
When doing this, the user would have no issues with icon generation (especially if you open the API up to developers who are making tools), nor would they need to have a special outline/shader that must be used when generating the icons either (but a custom shader for bright/dark images might actually still be a great option in user preferences BTW, if it’s not too complex).
Good point, I would like to see control over the thumbnails in preferenes
set the background color
set the light intensity
set the rotation angle
2 Likes
Hy, just jumping by to share some small QoL features that I think could make workflow better. That’s all of my opinion, nothing to take too seriously if you don’t agree with it! It’s in another thread that no one seems to have read hehe Quality of Life workflow changes that could help on common tasks.
Small feature request:
Allow us to set a Shader/Material for Gizmos.DrawMesh. Right now you can only draw gizmo meshes with the default gizmo material.
I have been looking for a keyboard shortcut to open the context menu (mouse right click) in the project view or hierarchy view. The windows native context menu key does not do the trick. I cannot find anything in the shortcuts manager. Google and forum search did not deliver, but that might be me… anyone figured this out?
@willgoldstone can you have a look at this stream, Twitch (i dont know him, just watched the stream today)
i think it highlights many issues that users bump into. (specifically he’s testing new XR system, docs, URP, and many other general UX/learning unity related things too)
This might have been mentioned already but there is alphabetical sorting all over the place with no alternatives available. Three examples immediately come to mind:
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Search results in the hierarchy window. 9 times out of 10 I would prefer to see them in the order that they appear in the hierarchy, top to bottom.
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Search results in the project window.
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Assets in the project view are sorted alphabetically. Often, I would much rather see them sorted (and thus grouped) by their type.
Simple additions that would dramatically improve my workflow!
2 Likes