Objects

This lesson will teach you how to place objects in the scene and how to update their Properties.

Core Content

All the assets you can place in your game are in the Core Content window. If you have closed your Core Content window, then you can open it up by going to the Window menu, hover over Core Content, and then select Core Content 1 option.

If you want to move the table, use the green, blue or red arrows. This group of arrows is called the gizmo. The default gizmo is a group of arrows to move the position of an object along an axis. You can also rotate the table by pressing the Rotation icon and change the scale of the table with the Scale icon.

Tip: the fastest way to change the gizmo is using the position, rotation and scale shortcuts, respectively W, E and R.

Properties

To access the Properties of the table, you can either click on the table in the Main Viewport or on the name of the table in the Hierarchy. Your Properties window will show you different sections. Some sections are common to most objects (Transform, Scene, Gameplay) and some of them are specific to 3D objects (Rendering, Base Material).

The Transform section contains the position, the rotation and the scale of the object. If you need to place an object at a specific position or if you want to double the size, you can update the Transform in the properties instead of using the gizmo.

The Scene section allows you to change the visibility and collision of any object. To hide an object, set the Visibility to Force Off. To remove the collision, set the Game Collision to Force Off. If you don’t want the camera to be constrained by the object, set the Camera Collision to Force Off.

The property Inherit From Parent means that if the parent of this object is not visible, the child won’t be visible too. This can be useful if, for example, you want to make a group containing 4 invisible walls. The group will have the Visibility to Force Off and all the walls inside this group won’t be visible.

The Gameplay section will let you update settings that can be useful for some gameplays. In a shooter game with one spawn zone per team, you could disable “Enable Team Collision” so that only the enemy will collide with the object. The spawn zone is now protected from enemies because they won’t be able to enter. The Team field should be 1 for the first zone and 2 for the other zone.

Another useful property is the Lifespan. If an object has a Lifespan of 2, it will disappear two seconds after it appears. This will be useful when we spawn objects from a script that only need to be visible for a limited time.

Object properties

The table placed in the house is a 3D object and as with any 3D object in Core, you can find the Rendering (mesh of the object, the 3D object representing the shape of the object) and Base Material (the texture of the object, it can be sand, wood and many more) sections in the properties.