Custom Components for building 2D world - unity3d

Hi I'm trying to make a game world which is built from 2D sprites.
For example (http://opengameart.org/sites/default/files/Preview_97.png)
I first attempted to build a single house and after perfectly aligning about 30+ sprites I realized the scale of the task I have given myself.
I'm wondering is it possible to create a custom component where i can give it a public width/height and it will create a house out of small sprites both in the editor and when I play the game.
If it is can someone give me a simple example on how to go about this as I have never created custom editing tools in unity.

What you need is called "tile editor".
You can find many editors in Unity Asset Store.
Here is one of them named exactly "Tile Editor": https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/23091
If you do not want a paid one you can search for free version of that tools.

Related

Implementing payed 3D models into Unity Games

I've started learning gaming development using Unity and there's a thing I wasn't able to fully understand. I stumbled across the Sketch Fab website and noticed this cool market with 3D models and I was wondering what are the requirements to import such a model into an actual game.
For example this one already has animations:
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/royal-knight-895d1c1d222d4efd9f264318e8ab0cb2
But on the other hand others don't have:
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/crusader-knight-b079a8e34f454836bc8107c21c8c47fe
I have basically 2 questions:
If I buy the first model is this going to save me a lot of time and I can jump straight into implementing the character into an actual game and add custom scripts to it etc?
If I buy the second one, what would I need to too to actually animate this character? Is this something that somehow I can learn from Unity tutorials or would I need to import it to a tool like Blender to further improve this model with animations?
This question provokes a lot of answers. The first model you show does have a .fbx format and the animations will hopefully work fine. This format is typically what you want to use with Unity.
The second model is not Rigged (look at the product description). What this means is you will have to rig every bone yourself (in Blender) and make it compatible with Unity. I never buy a model that isn't rigged.
To add animations to the second character, you can download some from www.mixamo.com or use many of the animations you will find in the Unity Asset Store.
Personally, I prefer getting my models from www.turbosquid.com. You can search against multiple formats including .unitypackage
As Jiveturkey said, the first model is directly compatible with unity and doesn't require any additional steps - so if you're looking to focus solely on building the game without worrying about animation then you might want to go with the first model.
The second model isn't rigged, so you would have to manage all rigging and animating yourself - Unity does have a built-in rigging package, so you would be able to do that within unity rather than using Blender (Link to tutorial for rigging in Unity, Rigging tutorial directly from unity)
Unity can read .fbx, .dae (Collada), .3ds, .dxf, .obj, and .skp files for 3D models, and that's pretty much the only requirement. There are tons of sites with free 3D assets if you don't want to spend the money as well Itch.io, Unity Asset Store, and tons more - these are just the ones that come to mind

What unity tools should I use to draw 2d sprites on the screen?

I am writing that in the likeness of a visual novel in unity. But not much oriented in its tools and assets. The idea is that I only need to draw certain sprats within the screen: characters, background, text, effects.
But only within the boundaries of the screen and it is desirable to control the position of these sprites should be in relative coordinates at the screen itself.
But what is better to use for this?
I assume that canvas suggests something similar (a UI display which should not go beyond the boundaries), but even if how exactly to draw? put panel on top of each other with alpha channel for each "layer": background, character, text?
But how then to move sprites?
You could use the ganvas ui of Unity to put your backgrounds, Text and decision Buttons on the screen.
Then you should create a Dialogue Parser Script wich takes a text file, which will hold the actual text of what is happening and then present that text to the player.
The file should contain information of the character, what each character should say, and what choices to give the player.
Then you need a script that will actually show the game dialogue.
But I think there are plenty usefull tutorials on youtube and so on to create a simple 2D visual novel game.
If you never did a 2D Game in Unity before you could take a look at the 2D Game Tutorials:
https://learn.unity.com/project/creator-kit-rpg?language=en
This tutorial teaches you this 2d game creation fundamentals and only take one hour.
If you want to create a visual novel game without programming you could use this free Visual Novel Toolkit from the Unity Asset store:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/visual-novel-toolkit-free-9416

Vuforia Unity - Tracking simple 3D shapes

Currently, I know that Vuforia can track objects that are scanned in the targets database. This means that if I wanted to recognize many objects, I have to scan each of them and upload them into the database.
Here’s what I want to create. I want to create an app using Unity that can recognize and track simple shapes (such as a rectangular box or a spherical ball) disregarding the size. For example, the app should be able to recognize a small Kleenex box as well as a big shipping box.
Is it possible to recognize these shapes with minimal object targets (e.g. recognize all rectangular objects with one object target)? If so, how can I set up vuforia to do so? I understand that this question may be confusing to understand, and I will do my best to elaborate more clearly. Thanks so much!

Spritesheet creator/importer for unity3d

I am currently developing a 2d game for android using Unity3d , but i am wondering if is there any free sprite sheet creator software that is compatible with unity3d without the extra code to be written , i've tried texture packer with there plugin for unity and it work great but this software is paid and i can not afford it right now ,
i also tried Sprite Sheet Packer but when i import the sprite sheet into unity and trim the sprites in the editor the animation does not work properly due to the fact that unity did not know the pivot point and the exact information of the sprite inside the created sprite sheet,
Does anyone know some useful free software that i can use or some unity plugin that can serve this problem ?
I personally always used TexturePacker (then when I moved to Unity, NGUI does the work for me), so this is a recommendation from a friend:
http://renderhjs.net/shoebox/
A quick test showed that it made a PNG and accompanying XML file with the image data inside. Seems pretty simple.
This question still actual in 2017. So this is my approach:
1) Get xml file with coordinates from your editor. I use DarkFunction sprite editor for fast and smart creation of coordinates. It's free and pretty clever to do lots of jobs automatically.
2) Install this asset from asset store, it's free.
3) Tweak the TextureAtlasSlicer.cs file from the installed asset to correspond to your xml format. You have to do this only once.
That's it.

iPhone app 3d engine or not

I am developing a simple iPhone app, which:
retrieves data from the server
presents the data
In order to present the data better I want to add nice 3d dynamic objects, for example:
a car with spinning wheels next to car sales bar chart.
power plant with smoke coming out of the chimney next to CO2 emission numbers
The questions are:
How do I work with the designer on this, what output should he provide for me (format)?
How do I put it in my application, should I involve some 3d engine/framework?
The team behind cocos2D has just announced cocos*3D* and this seems really promising.
The first public beta can be downloaded
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/archives/1274
You can use cocos2d for the iPhone and fake 3d with the art. So, you have a car that is drawn to look 3d but you're only using 2d to display it. The effects that you want to do don't require to use full 3d models.
You may also have a look at this one I discovered recently:
http://nineveh.gl/
It's pretty new but well documented and with video demos.