Author: <Nathan Kassai> Email: kassan@unlv.nevada.edu
Date: Last modified on <01/28/2023>
Keywords: <Unity, Tutorial, Step-by-Step>

Time to complete - 50 minutes

This first section of this Unity crash course involves the following:

• Brief introduction to Unity
• Installing Unity
• Understanding the layout and some key terminology
• Writing our first “Hello World” script

Before starting this tutorial, it's best that you have a PC with the following requirements:

On June 8th, 2005, the popular game engine we all know and love today, Unity, was released. Originally, Unity was solely designed to be just a game engine, a collection of tools, libraries, and assets to prototype a 2D/3D game. Why as a roboticist then would you benefit from learning Unity? Well, over the course of its existence, Unity expanded from a mere game engine to a platform capable of virtually anything! Virtual/Augmented reality applications, generating 3D visualization tools, film production, generating browser/console applications, touch screen applications, and more recently, robotic simulations and teleoperation!

(Maybe include video here of compilation of project used in the lab with Unity)

In this crash course, I plan on teaching you the basics of Unity: understanding how Unity works, learning how to write scripts to implement custom behaviors, general terminology, etc. With these basics, by the end of the course, we will then learn how to send joint data to a robotic arm using ROS!

Without further ado, let us begin with the installation process.

First things first, download Unity Hub here and click on Download for Windows.

After downloading, run the executable to install the Unity Hub. Once the installation has finished, you should see the following:

Once you have reached this page, you may either log in with the DASL Unity account, or you may choose to make your own.

After logging in, it will ask if you would like to install the latest Unity editor. Press Skip Installation (we will be downloading an earlier Unity Editor version). Finally, Unity will ask you to activate a personal license, press Agree and Get Personal Edition License.

Once you have finalized the Unity Hub installation, you should see this page.

As previously mentioned, this is known as the Unity Hub. The Unity Hub is where you are able to manage all of your created projects, as well as install versions of the Unity Editor. The Unity Editor is where we actually create our applications. We cannot create a project in Unity if we do not have a Unity Editor!, so, lets us install a 2020+ version.

To do so, click on Install Editor located at the center of the Unity Hub. Once pressed, scroll down to the Long Term Support (LTS) section and click install on the 2020.3.44f1 Unity Editor version. After pressing install, it gives you options to install additional packages. For now, we do not need any of these packages, we will just press install (this can take 10-20 minutes).

After the installation has completed, switch over to the Projects tab and press New Project.

The template that we will be using for this project is 3D Core! Press the core tab and press 3D Core as seen here. Once you select it, give your project a name, and choose where you would like this project to be stored. Once you have done that, press create project.

Once it has loaded, you should see this screen:

Now that Unity has been fully installed, its time we take a look at the layout of Unity.

For questions, clarifications, etc, Email: kassan2@unlv.nevada.edu