[RELEASED] Handy Hacks for Unity

Handy Hacks for Unity

Get access to popular tools from other 3D programs + a few clean shortcuts for Unity-specific development.
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Orientation Gizmo
Get more control over the orientation of the editor camera
while working on a scene. This widget that lets you quickly
snap the scene view to the local orientations of an object.

Navigation Shortcuts
Navigate like a power user with hotkeys to quickly
snap a scene view to common viewing angles

Ruler & Protractor
Measure distances and angles on the fly
using intuitive scene view overlays.

Create Empty Parent
Creates an empty game object and automatically
groups your selection as children of it.

Screen Space Transform Tools
Move and rotate objects relative to the camera,
the way you can in a lot of other 3D applications.

Deselect All
Exactly what it sounds like. Use the menu option or keyboard
shortcut (Ctrl/ Command + Shift + A) to clear your selection.

Batch Replace Objects
This wizard replaces objects in your scene with copies of
an object or prefab of your choosing. Replacement objects
can optionally take on the rotation and scale of
the object they're replacing.​

 

Looks cool

 

Thanks!

 

What an excellent suite of tools! Was just curious, would you expose the key bindings? I happen to use an asset that already uses some Alt-based keybindings.

When do you think this would be available?

 

Thanks!

I've been looking into making a settings menu where you could customize the key bindings, and it's actually the next thing on my list

I'm hoping to have it ready to submit in another week or two, so with any luck it'll be available within a month.

 

Looks very useful

 

They've sure made my life easier, but I'm relieved to hear it from other people

 

yeah I'll bet

 

Hey all, just a quick update on Handy Hacks:

Deselect All
It's a small addition, but I've added a function that lets you Deselect All objects using Ctrl + Shift + A
It's something I've wanted for a while, but had just never made. While polishing up this asset, it seemed like a good fit so I've added it

Key Bindings
Now for a bit of a bummer. I've spent the past week learning about EditorPrefs, making a custom Preferences menu and trying to figure out how to make it easy for users to customize the hot keys associated with my tools. Unfortunately, though it turns out to be quite the challenge. So much so, that I don't think it's possible to dynamically modify keybindings on any Menu Items. I was part way through coding my own keyboard listeners in the base editor update, but in the end I've decided that I'm going to submit Handy Hacks without customization support. I would hate to build a half-baked solution that frankly wasn't even a very good one, and have the asset break. Handy Hacks was designed as a minimal user friendly set of tools, and I was just kind of getting away from that philosophy with my key binding experiments.

As a compromise, I'm going to add a detailed walk through to my documentation for anyone who wants to change the key bindings directly from the source-code. It's a simple process (promise!) and it's the only solution I have right now that will for sure not introduce bugs to the package I submit to the Unity Asset Store. I am interested in revisiting this problem in the future, but for now I'm just trying to be honest about my own limitations.

If anyone is curious, here's Unity's own walkthrough: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/MenuItem.html

General Housekeeping/ Best Practices
I got linked to a great thread by @TonyLi that goes over some best practices for a code asset, and I've been using it as a guide to clean up my code and organize my asset for submission. It's small stuff to the end user, but It's made a world of difference for me, and the code has never been friendlier Seriously, if you make code assets then check it out. It's wonderful.

And that's it for now! Moving forward, I'm going to be shifting focus to creating my documentation and getting ready for submitting! Thanks to everyone for their support/ questions/ feedback so far. If anyone else has anything to ask or suggest, please drop a message here! This is my first asset, and I want it to be the best it can be

 

Looks pretty cool. There have been a few times where I wish I had these tools.

 

I'm already using Deselect All. It blows my mind, that it isn't a default Unity function and New Object as Parent defenatly would be handy for my workflow.

 

You'll like having it

In case you're curious, you'll be able to safely remove individual tools from your project. That way, if you would prefer to keep using the deselect all script you already have, you can just delete the c# file in my version.

 

Quick update:

I've got the User Manual written up now, and I made a proper settings menu for added control over the tools in the asset.



All that's left is to finish up the key images and screenshots for the asset store page. Once all that businessy non dev work is done, I want to take a day or two to run some QA and fix a few bugs.

I feel like such a slowpoke, haha. This is taking longer than I thought it would.

For anyone still paying attention, thanks for your patience! Finding time to work on this has been hard this past month, and I'm still learning the ropes when it comes to publishing an asset.

 

Handy Hacks has just been added to the asset store! Thank you to everyone who got in touch and helped me along the way. A special shoutout to Purple Jump for letting me use their asset pack for my screenshots.

I hope you like the package, and I hope to iron out any problems and add new features in the months to come

 

There's a tool that I can't find. I would definitely buy Handy Hacks if you'll add it, so consider it a feature proposal. I believe, in other editors it's called fullbright option. Basically I would love to use a shortcut between a scene lit with scene lighting and bright liten scene. This tool will greatly help people who work with levels that use dark lightning. Basically it should work like this.

 

Sounds pretty useful! I'll start looking into it, and I'll post any updates here

*EDIT*

@Gua so, there's a button on each Scene View window that seems to do this:




Are you looking for a keyboard shortcut for this action, or is there something else you had in mind?

 

Unfortunately this button doesn't do what I described, cause it doesn't affect Ambient Lightning. So if developer is using dark ambient color or low ambient intensity, scene will still too dark for a comfortable work.

Here's what I get when I just disable lightning with that button.


Here's what I want to get with fullbright mode.

 

Ahhh, gotcha. Thanks for clearing this up

 

@Gua small update for ya

I was actually able to find a way to check if that scene lighting button was active, and then change the ambient intensity for the scene. "Simple!" I thought

It turns out that the trick is saving your real light settings, and also taking into account that some scene views may be full bright while others are not. I'm experimenting with having the lights match whichever scene view is active, but it's not an ideal solution, so I'm also exploring other options.

I'm working on Handy Hacks part time, but with the holidays coming up, I'll hopefully have more focused time to work the problem and share my results

 

This option probably should also disable fog.

 

@SarfaraazAlladin, so were you able to make this tool and is reasonable to assume that it will be added to Handy Hacks anytime soon?

 

I wish I was writing with better news, but I haven't gotten very far with this feature

I've been writing and rewriting the code for days now, but I can't find a way to make the unlit mode stable or reliable. Unity's scene windows are separate objects, but the lighting settings are global. I was at the point of changing the lighting settings every frame for each scene window in order for it to kind of work, but it was causing the lighting window's settings to lock up (you couldn't change them using their sliders and text boxes, etc)... There was trouble with reliably saving your real scene lighting settings too... it's just a mess.

Maybe a more talented programmer could come up with a solution, but based on everything I've learned, Unity would need to make some changes at the core of their scene view & lighting systems in order to make this work... At the very least, I would need access to more event callbacks that don't exist.

tl;dr I have been defeated by this one, and will not be adding it to Handy Hacks at this time. It's hard to imagine that Unity will change the systems that would make it possible to write a proper unlit mode. Sorry if I had gotten your hopes up

If you end up finding someone who can do this though, please link me to them! I would love to learn any new tricks that people have to work around Unity's core.

 

Thanks for trying!

 

Submitted a new version of Handy Hacks to the store today. I added angle snap features to the ruler & protractor tools. Holding Ctrl/ Command will make the ruler & protractor snap based on Unity's built in angle snap settings

Thank you so much to everyone who has bought Handy Hacks so far, and a special thanks to those who reached out with feedback.

If you haven't yet, check it out on the store

 

Handy Hacks v0.3.1 is not available on the Asset Store

I've got some new features in the works for my next update, so stay tuned for that! Oh, and if you're on the fence about getting Handy Hacks, just be aware that I'm probably going to up the price with my next submission since there will be a new tool rolling out.

Happy Developing.

 

Oh! Nice find.

Have you thought a bout adding align or quick align?
Quick align is probably the feature I miss the most in unity from Max / Maya.

 

It's not something I had thought of much, but I'm willing to give it a shot

 

Just submitted a new version of Handy Hacks! This new update will bring the first new feautre.

Introducing Navigation Shortcuts.


If you're used to working in Blender, then this will be pretty familiar to you. You'll be able to use these keys instead of the scene gizmo, while the orbit controls will let you incrementally rotate the scene view up, down, left, or right to view what you're focused on from any angle.

I've got two more features almost ready to submit, but they'll be coming a little bit down the line.

Aside from those, I plan to start working on Alignment tools for those of you who have been requesting them. I think they would be a very welcome addition to Handy Hacks

Oh, and I'll take this as an opportunity to tell you that the price for Handy Hacks is going up with this update, so this is a last call to get it while it's 5 bucks.

 

Just submitted a new build of Handy Hacks to the asset store!

I didn't mention this last month, but I also updated the code in August to be compatible with Unity 2017.1

In the upcoming version I gave the orientation gizmo some love:

• Added a save state so the gizmo will automatically appear when you start Unity or re-compile your code.
• Added a dedicated 2D version of the gizmo that makes more sense for use in 2D viewports

I'll post a gif or two when the package is approved to show off how the 2D orientation gizmo works.