6 MUST USE Packages for Unity3D

over the last few years unity started to move a lot of functionality into the package manager so today i want to cover the top six most important packages that i think every developer should know about should understand and should probably use in their projects so if you're a unity developer and you're not using these packages already get ready because you're going to find some really useful information here and if you are already using these packages well then you'll find out that your recommendations or your uses match mine and you're doing the right thing also if you go through this video and you see some packages missing something that you think everybody should know about or everybody should use drop a comment down below and while you're at it don't forget to hit the like button and subscribe before i run you through the list of these top packages let me show you real quick where the package manager is and how it works to access the package manager in unity you just go to window and then package manager pretty simple to find right then you need to go to this packages selection up here by default it might say my assets it might have a big list of all of your assets from the asset store this is the same place that you'll download assets that you buy on the asset store or it might show in project which will just show a couple of things depending on what your project's set up for but what you want to look for is the unity registry and this will give you the list of all of the packages available from unity directly there are other packages out there that you can grab using a git repository we're not going to go into those right now though we're going to go into again the top most important packages that are already there that you should probably be using already let's start with package number one and this is the package i've been recommending for the longest time it used to be an asset that got bought and brought into unity and became a package and part of the default editor and that's text mesh pro text mesh pro is a unity package that just allows you to make beautiful looking text that animates does all kinds of cool fancy things and performs really well in unity there's really no reason to use the normal text object instead of text mesh pro i've never found one and i recommend that every project just pull in text mesh pro from the start as a default thing as long as you're going to use some text i guess if you have no text at all in your game some kind of weird textless game then don't use it but if you're using text at all i recommend text mesh pro in everything this next package belongs in almost every project as well and that's cinemachine it's a camera control system that was also brought into unity it used to be an asset from the asset store and it allows you to do really advanced camera controls and camera swapping camera fading camera transitions and just about everything else that you would want to do with a camera really easily without writing any code so if you need to have a camera that maybe follows a group of targets or focuses on something and zooms in and locks into an area cinemachine will do that all for you without you having to write any code yourself there are a bunch of extensions and tutorials out there that explain how to use it i'd recommend that if you grab cinemachine try it out play with the defaults a little bit play with the demos and then find some tutorials to do exactly what it is that you want to do one thing to note though is that there have been a lot of versions with cinemachine and again there were asset pack versions of it right now it looks like ron 2.7.3 i expect that to just keep revving up and it changes quite a bit so make sure that if you're looking at documentation or asset information make sure that you're looking at updated stuff forced in a machine but i highly recommend it for just about every project that has any kind of advanced camera if your camera is just sitting still maybe you don't need it but if you want your camera to follow things around follow on a dolly or just again switch between different views and different cameras keep things inside it's great for that and it makes it extremely easy and allows you to just focus on your game this next package might not belong in every kind of game because it's a 3d world building asset the asset's name is pro builder and it's been around for a long time just like cinemachine it used to be an asset pack it's been revved many many times right now we're on version five and it's an extremely useful tool for prototyping or building out levels i know some artists who can build out amazing beautiful levels with it where they build out essentially an entire game world and then i know a lot of programmers like myself who just use it to prototype out areas plan things and get an idea of where we want things to be and how we want it to look and then we hand that off to an artist or a game designer to go turn it into something beautiful in maya or however they're going to do it but if you're building levels you're building 3d worlds at all or you're just building simple things where you need some sort of an area to experiment maybe you're trying to build out some ik controller for your feet and you need some stairs pro builder will just build you out a staircase a little area that you can walk along and some ramps and some other hills and all kinds of cool little things that would normally take a little bit of extra work if you're not an artist to build especially for me kind of thing that i would struggle to go jump into blender figure it out run through the tutorials again and then export it i can do them very easily in pro builder and i think so can you even if you're not a programmer you're not an artist and you're not a designer you can do a lot of really interesting level building with two or three different tools in pro builder alone so i highly recommend that you pull it into your projects if you're doing anything in 3d and give it a try the next package follows the same pattern of being an asset that it was good enough that it needed to be turned into a package and brought in enough key core functionality that really needs to be used in a lot of different game types to really justify it that's the new visual scripting system it used to be called bolt it used to be again a third party asset on the asset store now it's integrated and really a good way to do visual scripting in unity now if you're not sure why you would want to do any visual scripting maybe you're a programmer and you're thinking why would i want to waste my time and energy on visual scripting i've done a few videos about this already and i plan on doing quite a few more so you can check them out down below or subscribe and be ready for the new ones but i think that visual scripting has a lot of really handy uses when you're a game developer working on a team especially if you want to be able to hand things off to game designers and give them the ability to really customize and make some fun functionality without needing you to go in and tweak and adjust code constantly so visual scripting can be an extremely powerful addition it can also make it extremely fast to build and populate out your world with things that you couldn't do without a visual scripting system at least couldn't do as easily so i definitely recommend checking it out it's extremely easy to use and to implement into your own games as a little part or even a big part so check it out try it out and let me know what you think about it too i'm curious to see what everybody else's opinions are on the new visual scripting setup and just on visual scripting in general so just drop a comment down below let me know if you love visual scripting hate it and if you want to see more about that just i could go way deeper on it probably talk about it a whole lot but i don't want to do it if everybody hates it so if you like that stuff let me know the last two packages i wanted to mention are the universal and hd rendering pipelines these are the new rendering pipelines using unity's updated technology that allow you to do some really advanced looking graphics make things look really pretty amazing and have great performance on mobile devices vr and just about everywhere else a lot of people aren't using the universal render pipeline yet or the hd render pipeline because they're not really sure which one they should go with in general if you're not sure you're kind of up in the air and you're using the standard one because you don't really know what to do i would say you probably want to look at the universal render pipeline there may be some things missing if the pipelines are constantly getting updated so there might be some feature missing that you need in urp i would do a quick search make sure that none of the restrictions that are currently in place matter for your game before switching but then do a commit to source control update your whole project and see how it works the process to upgrade to the universal render pipeline is extremely easy it's pretty much automated you just have to hit a couple buttons and wait just make sure that you have that commit point so you can go back and i guess that'll lead us to one little bonus one which is the unity collaborate system if you're not using any source control at the very least enable collaborate though you don't have to do that through the package manager it does pull in a package anyway use some sort of source control so that whenever you make these big changes or you pull in these packages you can go back and undo them if you run into a problem or you find that it was more work than it's worth or just not giving you the payoff that you need and i would say you should use source control all the time for just about everything anyway all right thanks for watching i hope this was somewhat helpful i wanted to give you again my favorite packages if you have packages that you think everybody should use please drop them down below leave a comment or at least hit the thumbs up button and go share the video somewhere else all right thanks again for watching and i'll see you soon

Channel: Jason Weimann

Views: 59,692

Keywords: unity 3d, unity, unity tutorial, unity3d, game dev, unity 3d tutorial, unity 3d tutorials for beginners, gamedev, brackeys, unity3d college, beginner, unity game dev, unity technologies, unity package manager, probuilder, cinemachine, textmeshpro, urp, hdrp, unity 2d, game development for beginners, unity beginner tutorial, game development unity

Id: aqWGpdLSvr4

Length: 9min 12sec (552 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021