Explanation of how to calculate transforms in Unity - unity3d

I am getting started with Unity and am just trying to get my head around the units. What are these units? It seems they are their own 'quantity' and to treat 2 units as 2 times the value of 1 unit.
Anyway - I am trying to workout how to optimally calculate transforms to objects sit exactly where I want them to.
In my scene I have a terrain and a cylinder as so:
As you can see my cylinder is floating. I want the cylinder to sit perfectly on top of the terrain.
My terrain is at the following transform: 0,0,0 and scale 0,0,0 (not sure how to tell it's dimensions yet).
My cylinder is part of a new object, as so:
My FirstPersonPlayer is at transform: 85.9,2.165,51.8 and scale 1,1,1. My Cylinder is at 'localposition' 0,0,0 and local scale 1.2,1.8,1.2
Now - the transform of FirstPersonPlayer on the y axis appears to be what I need to correct.
Currently it is set to 2.165 and is floating a bit above the terrain.
Through manually shifting it, around 1.85 looks about right - but I want to know how to calculate that, rather than doing a finger in the air 'that looks about right'.
Can anyone help me? (Before you suggest using gravity etc , I actually am, but don't want the player falling as soon as they start, however slight that may look or feel.
Many thanks,

As per #Nikola Dimitroff the answer is:
You don't have to compute anything, hold Shift + Control and drag the object. Every game engine ever made calls this "Snap to Ground"
I appreciate and agree with the other comments.

Related

(UNITY) Plane not rotating to normal vector of three points?

I am trying to get a stretched out cube (which we can call a plane for the sake of discussion) to orient itself to the normal vector of a plane described by three points. I wrote a script to find the normal of three points, and then used transform.LookAt to have the planes align. However, I am finding that this script is not working at all how it is intended to and despite my best efforts I can not figure out why.
drastic movements of the individual points hardly effect the planes rotation.
the rotation of the object when using the existing points in the script should be 0,0,0 in the inspector. However, it is always off by a few degrees and as i said does not align itself when I move the points around.
This is the script. I can also post photos showing the behavior or share a small unity package
First of all Transform.LookAt takes a position as parameter, not a direction!
And then it
Rotates the transform so the forward vector points at worldPosition.
Doesn't sound like what you are trying to achieve.
If you want your object to look with its forward vector in the given normal direction (assuming you are calculating the normal correctly) then you could rather use Quaternion.LookRotation
transform.rotation = Quaternion.LookRotation(doNormal(cpit, cmit, ctht);
alternatively to this you can also simply assign the according vector directly like e.g.
transform.forward = doNormal(cpit, cmit, ctht);
or
transform.up = doNormal(cpit, cmit, ctht);
depending on your needs

Unity: Create AnimationClip With World Scale AnimationCurves

I've been looking for a solution to this for quite a while now (meaning several days) and I haven't found anything yet. Maybe I'm thinking about it wrong and there isn't a way, but let's try!
I'm recording hand-data on a Hololens (the Unity Hololens Input Simulation for now). This essentially gives me one float AnimationCurve for each hand joint for each transform.position.x to z and rotation.x to w. Now my goal is to put these curves into an AnimationClip and add it to an AnimatorController (via an AnimatorOverrideController) that animates a hand rig and replay the recordings. Everything so far works!
However, the recorded hand-data from the Hololens is in world scale, not in local scale. (which makes sense, since you usually want absolute coordinates when you want to know where the hand is.) But to animate the hand, it seems I'm only able to set local coordinates, which I don't have.
Example:
clip.SetCurve("", typeof(Transform), "localPosition.x", curve.PositionX);
Here, the clip takes the the x-coordinates from some hand joint and puts it to the localPosition.x of the corresponding hand rig joint. The problem: curve.PositionX is world-scale (absolute coordinates), but localPosition.x takes local-scale (coordinates relative to its parent).
I can't simply change "localPosition.x" to "position.x", like so:
clip.SetCurve("", typeof(Transform), "position.x", curve.PositionX);
even though the Transform class has both properties and position is the object's world scale position. I'm not sure why this doesn't work, but it gives me the following error:
Cannot bind generic curve on Transform component, only position, rotation and scale curve are supported.
I'm aware that it doesn't make much sense to use absolute coordinates for an animation, but I simply don't have anything else.
Does anyone have an approach how I can deal with this in a sensible, not-too-cumbersome way? It seems I have all the important parts, I just can't figure out how to put them together. Thanks so much already! :)
From my basic understanding, it seems like you are using the Input animation recording service provided by MRTK. Unfortunately, MRTK does not provide the localPosition version of Curves data. However, you can modify the data from the recordingBuffer after the InputRecordingService stops recording.
So, this is a method worth trying for you: in the handJointCurves dictionary property of recordingBuffer field, a set of pose curves is stored for each joint. And then, base on this table:Joint pose curves, subtract the position value of the key None from the position value of each other joint in every key frame so that the localPosition based on the key None is obtained.

Unity Shader Graph: Combining texture rotation and offset

I'm making a water simulation, and I'm trying to visualize the velocity field. In this demo I continuously add water in the centre of the image, where the blue 'raindrop' things are.
I have a texture where rg is the X and Y direction of the velocity, and ba is the total movement of water through it (ie: every step ba = ba + rg * delta_time).
I'm working in Unity Shader Graph.
I want to rotate a 'ripple' texture in the direction of the velocity, and then translate in that direction as well. To prevent the shader from jumping around when the velocity changes I thought of using the ba channels (which were previously unused) to keep like a total velocity like described above.
However, both the rotation (based on velocity alone), and the translation (based on the 'total velocity') work fine on their own. But when I sum them together it looks like the translation is also rotated. I'm not sure why this happens.
Here's what I do:
First part: rotating my water texture in the direction of the velocity, and that looks fine:
The shader itself looks like this:
So basically I discretize the uv (custom function on the right), get the angle of the velocity (using arctan2), and then rotate each discrete block using the Rotate block. This works as expected.
Second part: translating the texture based on the total velocity (in the ba channels), also works as expected:
The shader itself looks like this:
Again I used the discretized uv, now I translate each block based on the ba channels, which contain the total of the velocity (ba = ba + rg * delta_time each time step). As you can see this shows the textures flowing away from the centre (where water is added constantly). This is what I would expect to happen.
Now, when I combine them, it goes wrong:
The one I circled in red shows the problem the best (though all block seem to have it to some degree, depending on how much they were rotated). The arrow point to the bottom-right, which seems to be correct, however it flows to the top now.
The shader:
So here I add the rotated discrete block to the translation. But it looks like the translation part now also rotated, even though I add them together after the rotation block. So while the translation isn't rotated, it looks like it is.
Why is this happening? And how can I fix it.
I hope I explained it adequately, since it's not easy to show in just pictures and gifs.
Thanks!
So I fixed my problem by rather than storing the x and y of the offset in the b & a channels, to just storing the total distance moved in the b channel (thus b += length(rg)).
Then I'm using float2(0, b)` as the offset.
This is then also rotated for some reason and visually works as I wanted it.
However, I still don't really see why, sometimes I think I get it, and then I think some more and I don't any more.
So if anyone knows why this happens and can explain, I'm happy to accept that answer.
However, for now it is solved.

How can I set a Projection Matrix to have a Tibia like projection?

I am beating my head a little bit here for a while but I still could bot find a way to set up a matrix that projects my Unity game in a Tibianeske like manner:
Reading on tutorials on internet I could figure out how a normal orthographic perspective works, but tibia's one is kind of odd.
Digging over webs I found in here a guy (Clint Bellanger) who describes really well how to get the same perspective in blender's render according to him:
Start with a scene in 45 degree isometric. Video game style, where
the camera angle is Blender (60,0,45).
In Blender if you look at Buttons Window -> Scene -> Render Buttons ->
Format, you can set the render aspect ratio. Set AspY to half of
AspX. This is the same as taking regular rendered output and scaling
X by 50%. If you rendered a cube, the top of the cube will be a
perfect square (though at a 45 degree angle).
We can then use Blender nodes to rotate the result 45 degrees. The
output:
Note this started as a cube, so there's a lot of "vertical"
distortion. So you might have to scale meshes to 50% Z before using
this method. Also notice the Edge seems to be applied after the
Aspect, so the edge isn't distorted.
Blend file: http://clintbellanger.net/images/temp/UltimaVII.blend (I'm
a Nodes noob so there might be a smarter setup).
For kicks, here is that tower again. I pulled it into the above
workflow scene and scaled Z by 50%. Click "Re-render this layer" on
the first node to create the composite.
On his method, he used stuff like rescaling the render and changing the scale of models, Im convinced I could get along just with the 4x4matrix in unity(or in any other 3d environment really).
Hope someone more experienced with perks of 3D maths could help me to figure it out. Thank you! =D
What you ask for is a simple parallel projection. The typical orthographic projection is just a special case where the projection rays are perpendicular to the image plane. However, every parallel projection can be represented by an affine shear transformation followed by a standard orthogonal projection.
Im convinced I could get along just with the 4x4matrix in unity(or in any other 3d environment really).
Yes. Using default GL conventions here, all you have to do is to take the standard ortho matrix, post-multiply it by an appropriate shear matrix and use that as the projection matrix.

2d Look at Function

I am creating a 2d sidescroller game. I have a point in space (where the mouse is) and I need the weapon to look and "follow" that point.
Does anyone know where to begin?
wikihow: How to Find the Angle Between Two Vectors
After you have the angle, you can appropriately rotate the thing to be rotated.
I am not sure if javascript also has an atan2(x,y) function, which could be used to get the angle.