Lesson 3.1 - Assembling the Set

For the rest of this course, you will be working with prepared starter files, structured to follow the progression of each lesson. Each unit will include resources to help you easily follow along with the materials.

Download the Project Materials for Unit 3 here.

1. Unpack the .zip file once it finishes downloading. You will see a folder labelled “Unit3_StarterFiles.”

2. Copy or move “Unit3_StarterFiles” from your downloads folder into your Projects folder location.

3. From the Unity Hub, in the Projects tab, select Add to add Unit3_StarterFiles as a new Project. Once it appears in the list, click it to open the project. If you are on a Mac and see a message asking you to Switch Target, select it. You might receive a notification that you are opening the project in a different Unity 2019.4 version. This is fine — the project will upgrade and open correctly.

Let’s begin assembling the environment as we did in Unit 2 by working with the largest compositional elements first, then moving to the more detailed foreground elements.

In the very back, the skyline is composed of 2D elements. Much like a matte painting in an old live-action set, the skyline’s 2D background resembles a recent live-action or animated production. The 2D background also serves as a visual anchor in our Scene for the rest of the background elements. The skyline itself is extended into two rows.

1. Search for the SM_Skyline_01 Prefab in the Project window. Left-click and drag it to the Hierarchy. The Prefab should be placed in your Scene and its Transform Position axes should be set to 0, 0, 0 in the Inspector.

2. We'll do the same for the second row. Search for the SM_Skyline_02 Prefab and place it in the Hierarchy. Again, its position should be set to 0, 0, 0 in the Inspector (Figure 01).

Figure 01: Adding the skyline to the Scene. The top-down view on the left is meant to show how there is distance between the two rows. This helps to create depth in the Scene.

Now let's begin placing the larger highrises.

1. Search for the SM_Bld_Background_Lrg_02 Prefab and place it in the Hierarchy. You can tell it’s a Prefab by the blue cube icon. Make sure you don’t select the Model or Mesh in the Scene view and position the first highrise on the left side of the skyline (Figure 02).

Figure 02: Adding the first highrise to the Scene.

2. In the Scene view, duplicate this highrise four more times and position each one apart from the others as indicated in the sketch (Figure 03).

Figure 03: The other highrises after they've been duplicated and repositioned in the Scene.

Next, let's add the multi-level highrises.

3. Search for the SM_Bld_Background_Lrg_01 Prefab and place it in the Hierarchy. In the Scene view, position the first one in front of the larger highrise to the left (Figure 04).

Figure 04: Adding the first multi-level highrise to the Scene. Notice how this one is placed in front of the larger highrise to the left. The others will be placed behind the remaining highrises.

4. In the Scene view, duplicate the multi-level highrises four more times and position them in between each of the larger highrises. Feel free to push them further back into the horizon and rotate them along the x-axis so they are not in line with the larger highrises. This will help create more depth in the Scene (Figure 05).

Figure 05: The other multi-level highrises after they've been duplicated and repositioned in the Scene

At this stage, we can create a new GameObject called Background to contain all of these elements and neatly sort them in the Hierarchy.

5. Create a new empty GameObject by going to GameObject > Create Empty. Rename it Background. In the Inspector, position it at 0, 0, 0. In the Hierarchy, move the objects in our Scene into this GameObject (Figure 06).

Figure 06: Organization will go a long way when assembling larger sets, so it's a good practice to separate your Scene out into different elements.

Now let’s place the foreground buildings and the street connecting them into the Scene. You’ll notice that the art team has grouped one large section of the foreground together.

1. Search for the SciFi_Environment Prefab and place it in your Hierarchy. It will appear in the Scene (Figure 07).

Figure 07: The SciFi_Environment Prefab contains most of our foreground elements in one piece.

In this lesson, you placed and arranged models to assemble the core components of the set. In the next lesson, we will learn how to model a prop for the set using ProBuilder.