Colored z x and y for faster learning

An idea for the developers.

I just started using unity its great i have an idea to make learning considerably easier and quicker it took me a while to figure out which way was x,y and z a thought is to have them as colored letters matching the drag arrows this will make it easy to remember and use when changing scales and stuff or writing code as well.

 

Red, Green, Blue. RGB.
Corresponds to X, Y, Z. XYZ.

Therefore,

X is Red, Y is Green, Z is Blue.

 

We have this little guy in the corner of the inspector if you get lost.



On a somewhat related note, I find using doing stupid hand gestures can be helpful in keeping track when it comes to vectors and figuring out which axis means what when rotating or using like Vector3.up, Vector3.forward etc

 

The colors for XYZ are RGB.
The directions are the most logical: X is right and Y is up, as it is on each and every 2d function graph; and the most natural direction for rest Z-axis is forward.

 

While coloring of axes is standard across pretty much all software, directions are not.

DirectX:
X is right, Y is up, Z is forward.
OpenGL:
X is right, Y is up, Z is backward.
Unreal engine:
X is forward, Y is right, Z is up.
Unity engine:
X is right, Y is up, Z is forward.
Blender:
X is right, Y is forward, Z is up (I believe).

 

You're right on this, just as confirmation.

 

You'd think something like this would be standardized by now.

My favorite is when the rotations are in the reverse direction.

 

It's been a particular pain in the butt for me last few days. Exporting a hundred terrain tiles from world machine which has flipped orientation to unity. You can set the orientation when exporting a mesh, but not bitmaps. So then I have to draw a diagram so I put things in the right spot.

 

Not going to happen, as multiple different fields have different conventions.

For some funny examples...

For example, on some system in screen coordinates Y points down.
I suppose this is because upper rows have lower memory address.
Speaking of bitmaps, in bmp format scanlines are stored from bottom to top, which is the opposite direction compared to screen memory layout.

 

blah blah blah. I wanna speak to the manager!

(sarcasm)

 

Untiy's editor GUI works like this.


X forwards, Y right and Z up has a bunch of advantages in 3D games. Most movement and spatial reasoning and whatnot is going to be on the flat plane. So you get to do:

Code (csharp):

1. movement = (input.x, input.y);

instead of

Code (csharp):

1. movement = (input.x, 0, input.y);

We've made two top-down games in a row, and there's so much code dealing with converting between 3D vectors and 2D xz Vectors.

for 2D sidescrolling games, though, we really want Unity's current system.


I'd be really happy if we could ditch the implicit conversion between Vector2 and Vector3, and add swizzles instead.

 

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. movement = forward * input.y + right * input.x;
3. [code]

 

How standard is a left hand coordinate systems among those? I'm used to using right handed coordinate systems in the motion capture software that I have used.

 

DirectX is left-handed.
OpenGL is right handed.
Blender is Right-Handed.
Unreal is left-handed.
Unity is left-handed.

The thing is, in case of graphical APIs themselves, being left/right handed is not set in stone, and you can use right handed transforms in DirectX, and left handed ones in OpenGL, but you'll need to alter projection matrix at the very last step.