Quick Start

3D Game Kit Walkthrough

3D Game Kit Reference Guide

3D Game Kit

The Explorer: 3D Game Kit. A collection of mechanics, tools, systems and assets to hook up gameplay without writing any code.

If you liked the 2D Game Kit, we're now bringing you the three-dimensional world of Ellen and her mission to explore the unknown alien landscape where her dropship has crash landed. 

The Explorer: 3D Game Kit

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Introduction to the Walkthrough

Editing with ProBuilder

Making an Acid Pool

Vertex Coloring with Polybrush

Using Environment Prefabs

Rock and Vegetation Painter

Organising Your Scene

Game Boundaries

A Deeper Look at Moving Platforms

Using Counters and Switches

A Deeper Look at Enemies

Creating A Trap

Adding A Respawn Checkpoint

Weapon Pickup

Restoring Health

Scene Teleportation

This is an in-depth guide that will walk you from building a level using ProBuilder and PolyBrush through to using all the interactive features and set dressing found in the 3D Game Kit. Most of the tutorial steps can be used as stand alone walkthroughs but please refer to the related tutorials throughout for a more in-depth understanding. 

If you want to get up to speed quickly please refer to the Quick Start Guide as it has smaller and more self contained tutorials and examples. To begin, make a new scene by following the instructions in Step 2 of the Quick Start Guide.

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La exploradora: Kit de juego en 3D

This is an in-depth guide that will walk you through from building a level using ProBuilder and PolyBrush through to using all the Interactable features and set dressing found in the 3D gamekit.

Most of the tutorials can be used as stand alone walkthroughs but please refer to the related tutorials throughout for a more in-depth understanding.

If you want to get up to speed quickly please refer to the Quick Start Guide as it has smaller and more self contained tutorials and examples.

To begin, make a new scene by following the quick start guide found here.

Your new scene will already have a square of ground that Ellen can run around on - let’s take a look at this now:

This Plane has been created with ProBuilder, a tool that enables you to create and edit 3D objects in Unity. The ProBuilder Window is open as we have a ProBuilder Mesh in the scene.

If it’s not open, you can open it from the top menu;

Click on Tools > ProBuilder > ProBuilder Window

Greyboxing is the art of creating simple shapes, or Geometry, in a scene to outline and plan a level you want to make. In game development this is the early stages of level design where you can quickly prototype and try out ideas. ProBuilder is a great tool for Greyboxing, so let’s create a new shape in our scene:

This will also open the Shape Tool window.

The Shape Selector dropdown allows you to create many different shapes.

For now we’ll create a Cube, which is the default shape:

You have now built a cube in the middle of the scene. Since our Plane is a little higher than the center of the cube it will be intersecting with the Plane.

You can move the Cube using the Move Tool. Click on any of the arrows in the scene view to move it where you like.

You can change the shape of the cube by using multiple tools in ProBuilder. To learn more about creating 3D models inside of Unity using ProBuilder, check out the ProBuilder101 tutorial and the documentation.

Press the Delete (Cmd + Backspace on Mac) key on your keyboard

Next we’ll move on to editing and painting our ground plane.

The ground is made of a ProBuilder Plane. These are usually flat, but by using PolyBrush we can create an uneven surface and paint textures to make this Mesh resemble the ground. We’ll be making a dip in the ground where we can add in a pool of Acid as a hazard for Ellen.

Mesh: A mesh consists of triangles arranged in 3D space to create the impression of a solid object. A triangle is defined by its three corner points or vertices.

Note: PolyBrush is currently in Beta, so you may experience some bugs using this tool.

We can make this Plane a bit larger for the level we will be building by scaling it:

Let’s open the PolyBrush Window and start editing:

Go to Tools > PolyBrush > PolyBush Window

Note: PolyBrush is currently in Beta, so the layout may change.

Click on the Push/Pull icon in the PolyBrush Window

Select the Plane and then Hover over it in the Scene View

The Push/Pull gizmo will appear wherever you move your mouse.

Left click to raise the ground by pulling vertices up

Or Hold Ctrl and left click to lower the ground by pushing vertices down

Now you know the basics, create a small dip on your plane using Ctrl + Left Click to start forming a pool. This doesn’t need to be too deep.

Click on the Push/Pull icon again when you are done editing to deselect the tool.

You should have something similar to the following.

For more information on PolyBrush and how to use it, visit the Tutorials and Documentation

For now, let’s continue to make our first hazard.

To find the Acid, we need to navigate to the Project window. This is where all the Prefabs and tools are stored:

Go to Assets > 3D GameKit > Prefabs > Interactables

Left-click and drag the Acid Prefab into the Hierarchy

The Acid will appear somewhere in your Scene. In Unity, you can locate an object quickly by Frame Selecting:

This will find and frame the Acid in the Scene view.

The Acid is currently too large, so let’s scale this down a little:

With the Acid selected, press R on the Keyboard for the Scale tool

Click and drag on the white box in the middle to make the Acid smaller

The Acid is also in the wrong position. Use the Move Tool (select the Acid and press W) to place the Acid just below the Plane, making it peek through slightly where you have made your pool.

You can continue to position and scale the Acid until you have the results you want.

Tip: The acid only needs to be just bigger than the space of your pool.

Press Play and test your Scene to check your bubbling Acid pool.

Note: When making a new Scene via the 3DGamekit toolbar menu, it will add a default DeathVolume area that is very large in size to allow you sufficient editing space. Be careful when lowering the terrain below this as Ellen will die on entry.

At the moment, Ellen can have a bath in the Acid and not get hurt, which doesn’t make it much of a hazard.

To make the Acid kill Ellen (sorry Ellen) when she steps into it:

This will add the Death Volume script to the Acid. This is a script we have made that instructs the game to cause Ellen to lose all her health.

Press Play and test your level. Try running into the pool of Acid, Ellen will die and respawn shortly after.

PolyBrush provides a very helpful 3D artist feature called Vertex Coloring that allows you to paint on the Vertex (The points that join together to make a surface) as opposed to painting directly onto the surface of the GameObject.

Similar to how the Push/Pull feature was used for creating the Acid Pool and Death Volume the painting will use the vertex to paint across the surface. The vertices are highlighted in the screenshot and the lines represent the polygon edges between them.

This may be strange at first as you may expect to be able to paint directly onto the surface whereas with vertex painting it takes the vertex and nearest vertices along the edge of the surface to "blend" the color/textures between them.

This is handled by the Materials which utilise Shaders (scripts) to group Textures (bitmap images) and render them on a GameObject. For a more detailed explanation of these topics please go to the Materials, Shaders and Textures page of the Manual.

To show this let's jump right in and start painting!

When you created the scene earlier using the kit the Plane was already created with a shader material attached to it. In the following steps you will see how this was created and dig deeper into what makes up the visual style and materials.

Let’s begin by setting up a basic plane and attaching a material.

Unless already open, open up the ProBuilder from the Tools > ProBuilder > ProBuilder Window

Select New Shape from the ProBuilder Window

In the Shape window select Plane from the drop down

This will add a plane to the Scene view with some default values attached, position it next to the default plane created earlier. To look like the one in the demo set the Plane values in the ProBuilder window to:

This should position the plane besides the existing plane generated in the level, if it does not perfectly align using the values, adjust as necessary.

Return to the Shape tool window and click Build Plane

Looking at the Inspector, you can see the Shader that is currently attached is simply Standard Vertex Color which will show as greyed out.

To change this you can add the the Materials created already in the 3D Gamekit. To locate these you can use the helpful Search by Type button  in the Project view and select Material from the drop down that appears.

This will update the Project view to show all the materials in the project.

In the 3D Gamekit the default Material attached to the main Plane is Default_Ground_Mat let’s filter the results further.

Type in default_ground_mat next to the t: Material text in the search field

Drag and Drop the Default_Ground_Mat.mat from the Project view onto the Plane in the Scene View to add the material to it.

Notice, in the Inspector that the Material has now updated to the Default_Ground_Mat

This will now allow you to use the material to paint on the Plane.

Go to Tools > Polybrush > Polybrush Window

Select the Paint Vertex Colors tab at the top of the Polybrush window

Notice how the texture is tiled across the Planes surface area with the default pattern on the left, and the vertex painted version on the right.

To see the textures that are currently mapped, go to Assets > 3DGamekit > Art > Textures > Environment > Ground in the Project view.

Tip: To navigate there quicker, however, you can use the Default_Ground_Mat Shader, click the arrow head next to the Material preview and select one of the textures, both methods will take you to the correct folder in the Project view.

To begin painting the new plane, select the Red paint from the Polybrush window to set the Brush Color.

This will allow you to use the mapped textures to paint, in this case the Moss_Albedo Texture to paint on the vertices.

Using the brush gizmo in the scene view, by moving it towards a vertex on the plane you can see the texture blending live in the editor, to make it permanent, simply click.

If you want to add some MuddyGround texture switch Brush Color to Blue and MuddyGround with SmallStone texture, switch Brush Color to Green in the Palette. This will give you a good variety on your surface.

Now it’s your turn to get creative with the brush! In combination with the Push/Pull, resizing of the brush and the Brush Colored textures you can create a great variety of painted meshes.

Tip: To try out the different colors you can live preview them in the editor to see the different textures and blending that is applied in the 3D Gamekit.

When using ProBuilder created objects in your scene, it is best to remove the Probuilder scripts when you are finished editing to prevent any unnecessary overhead in your game. It removes the scripts from either individually selected objects or all ProBuilder objects in the scene.

Click on Tools > ProBuilder > Actions and then select either to strip all or simply strip from the individually selected object.

This action is permanent so ensure that you have made all necessary changes to the meshes and vertex painting before doing this, the editor will warn you before completing the action.

We have built Level Geometry for you to be able to place where you wish. These can be found in Prefabs > Environment.

As an example, let’s drag a rock model into the scene:

In the Project window, go to Prefabs > Environment > Rock

Preview this model in the Preview Window at the bottom of the Inspector

Left-click and drag on the model in the Preview Window to rotate it and view it from different angles.

Tip: If you cannot see this window, click on the grey bar at the bottom of the Inspector and drag your mouse up.

As you spin the model around, you will see parts of the model are missing. This is normal because a lot of the geometry is missing the back. This makes larger scenes perform better and stop them from slowing your computer down.

The more geometry and special effects you add into your scene, the more your computer will need to process. On some machines, this can be incredibly large amounts of geometry and effects, while on others it can be very little. Keep this in mind when building your levels and, if your computer starts to slow down when you press play, you may need to remove some geometry.

We have used a few techniques like the above, to let you build as much as you can. The project will automatically detect your computer’s hardware and determine how much geometry and effects you can see and how detailed they are, similar to how PC games change settings depending on your computer. In the event you need to reset these settings or they do not set up automatically, go to Kit Tools>Auto Detect Quality Settings.

If you want to change these settings manually and see the breakdown of the settings go to Edit>Project Settings>Quality. This will open up the information in the Inspector for you adjust as you see fit.

Another technique we use to improve performance is the use of LOD groups. LOD stands for Level of Detail. Low-detail meshes are shown when the object is far from the camera and the difference will not be noticed. This is because meshes with simpler geometry are less demanding on the hardware.

Let’s look at CliffBig01 as an example;

In the Hierarchy, click on the arrow next to CliffBig01 to expose its children.

Click on each of the Children and watch them change in the scene view;

Here we can see the detail changing, we set each of these meshes to be displayed at different distances from the camera.

Click on the arrow next to CliffBig01 to collapse it

In the Inspector look at the LOD Group Component

Here you can see which models will be displayed at what distance from the camera. You do not need to change these settings as we have set them all up for you. The LOD group distances will be different depending on the quality settings that have been automatically selected for you.

For more information on LOD Groups, you can see our Documentation

To further spruce up your scene, we have created a Rock Painter and a Vegetation Painter. These tools allow you to place vegetation and rocks with varying sizes and rotations while keeping them aligned with the surface you are painting on.

In the Hierarchy locate VegetationPainter

Click on the arrow to expand its children

Hover the mouse over the ground in the Scene View

Left click to place some grass/lilly pads where you desire.

You can change the type of object being placed to do this;

In the Instance Painter component there are pictures of each prefab in the painter.

Click on the white highlighted box to select that Prefab to paint with.

Controls for the painter can be found at the top of the Instance Painter Component, some controls to get your started:

Any object you paint on will be stored as a Child of the Parent. For example;

Every object of that type from the paint will be stored here as a child. You can also click on these to individually edit and place them.

The process is the same to paint VegetationSmall, VegetationMedium & VegetationLarge

Hover your mouse over the desired area to place rocks and Click to place.

These tools help you to quickly add variation in the way you decorate your level. These can be found and placed the traditional way of dragging in prefabs from the Prefabs folder.

Go to Assets > 3DGameKit > Prefabs > Environment

Here you can find folders for Rocks, VegetationSmall, VegetationMedium, VegetationLarge.

You can click and drag any of these into the Scene View to place them in your level. Please note that position, rotations and size will not be randomised when dragging objects in this way.

Continue to place objects in your scene. Don’t forget to occasionally test your level by pressing Play to see how things are looking in the game.

We’ve created a small environment to show you game mechanics in the following chapters. Have fun and get creative with your level building!

When creating any scene in Unity, it’s important to keep things tidy in the Hierarchy so you can easily find objects or game mechanics you are looking for. The following are some tips to keeping your projects nice and organized although are not mandatory to use the Kit.

In the Hierarchy we have created sections to help order types of objects in our Scene.

These are made of empty GameObjects. They have no function other than to help us identify the types of objects in our scene. Note that all the objects underneath each named section are not children of that section and they shouldn’t be.

Let’s create a new section to store all of our extra level decoration;

At the top of the Hierarchy go to Create > Create Empty

This will create a new and empty GameObject named GameObject at the bottom of your Hierarchy

In the Hierarchy, make sure that GameObject is highlighted blue, indicating you have it selected. We can now rename this;

At the top of the Inspector click on the Name Field

Naming the sections in this way will help you find objects when you have a lot more.

Now let’s move CliffBig01 into the right section so we can find it easier later.

Left Click, hold and drag CliffBig01 until it is under ----- Environment ----- then let go of the Left Click

Tip: Make sure you do not let go of Left Click on top of another object as this will make it a child.

There is a visual indicator when something will become a child of an object when dragging, it will appear like this;

Ensure you see a horizontal line when you drag the object underneath ----- Environment -----. This indicates that it will place the object underneath like this;

In the event that you accidentally place it as a child of the label, you can simply move it back and try again.

When building a level you may find that in testing you can easily escape from your level and get outside where you want a player to be able to go. This can’t always be fixed by adding more geometry, we can add invisible walls to prevent players from being able to escape.

We can do this by adding a Collider on an empty GameObject and adding it to our scene;

In the Inspector Rename this to GameBoundary

Click on Box Collider to add it to the GameBoundary GameObject you just created

Now let’s locate this object in your Scene;

Press F on the Keyboard to Frame Select the Object.

The Box Collider is visible by a green outline. Position, rotate and scale this object to any problem areas in your level.

We need to ensure that this Collider will stop Ellen from being able to pass through it. We have set up a specific Layer for this, with GameBoundary selected;

In the Inspector click on the Layer drop down menu

Left Click on Environment to set it to that Layer.

We have placed ours in an area where the player can easily jump up and escape, don’t forget to test your game boundary by pressing Play.

We will take a look at adding various gameplay elements using the Kit. We have set up a demo level to show these, you can use your own scene you have built to follow along or use a new scene.

If you have used the 2D Game Kit, some of these techniques may be familiar although we have adjusted some elements to simplify workflow.

Moving platforms can be used to get your player from one place to another, let’s add one to our scene;

The Interactables folder is where you can find premade gameplay elements created for this Kit.

Left Click and drag the MovingPlatform Prefab into the Scene View OR the Hierarchy

Note: if you move this into the Hierarchy don’t forget to use Frame Select to find it (Keyboard Shortcut - F)

You can also position, rotate and scale the object through the Inspector in the Transform Component

Tip: Hovering your mouse over X, Y or Z and Left Click drag left or right will increase and decrease these values respectively.

Position the whole object where you would like the platform to start from.

We have positioned ours above the Acid pool we created earlier.

Now let’s take a look at making the platform and setting its path, to change where the platform will move to.

The moving platform comes with 3 gizmos attached to allow you to easily alter the motion of the platform. In the screen, you can see that it allows you to set the Transform Position to place it in the world (1), Starting position (2) and Ending Position (4) with the distance (3) between presented on the dashed translation line.

In the Inspector window, find the Simple Translator (Script) and check the box for Activate to enable the movement of the MovingPlatform.

If you’ve moved the Start location during this process before checking Activate, you will notice that the Moving Platform snaps to the Start location as opposed to the initial position set in Transform. This is to ensure the platform always starts from the right place and translates according to behaviours set in the Simple Translator Script.

Tip: Holding the Ctrl (Cmd) key when moving a gizmo snaps it to the grid and increments movements, this can really help in getting straight paths.

Ellen needs to traverse the environment and avoid the acid pool, therefore the End Gizmo needs to be adjusted or it will just do the default Translate on the Z Axis which is not very helpful to the player.

To see the current translation motion of the Moving Platform in the Editor, you can move the slider for Preview Position in a range from 0 to 1. You will see in the Scene window that the platform moves to where it would be in the game at that stage of the translation.

This is a very useful feature to help you see any potential overlaps with other GameObjects in the scene or preview the behaviour.

To alter the speed of the sequence from Start to End, you can change the Duration value which, is set to 5 by default and is measured in Seconds. Making this value smaller will result in a faster sequence and larger results in a slower translation.

Click on the Y handle (Green) on the End Gizmo, Press Ctrl (Cmd) to snap, then drag it down to your desired height.

In this example, we want it to be a straight translation downward. Drag the End Gizmo’s Z handle (Blue) and Snap (Ctrl/Cmd) drag the Gizmo to below the Start Point.

If you move the Preview Position slider now, the Moving Platform should move towards the new End Point position.

The last step for this example is to set the Loop Type to Ping Pong which is currently set to Once. Changing this will repeat the sequence from Start to End and back again.

3D Game Kit Walkthrough

1. Introduction to the Walkthrough

2. Editing with ProBuilder

3. Making an Acid Pool

4. Vertex Coloring with Polybrush

5. Using Environment Prefabs

6. Rock and Vegetation Painter

7. Organising Your Scene

8. Game Boundaries

9. A Deeper Look at Moving Platforms

10. Using Counters and Switches

11. A Deeper Look at Enemies

12. Creating A Trap

13. Adding A Respawn Checkpoint

14. Weapon Pickup

15. Restoring Health

16. Scene Teleportation

Complete this tutorial