Asset|Preview, level design tool.

Asset|Preview
an essential tool for any level designer with a lot of assets in their project! ​

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The tool is made for quickly and painlessly previewing and instantiating meshes and prefabs into your scenes.

Instead of going through the project view where you have to remember what the particular asset you want is named, you just quickly and visually find it in Asset|Preview, click it, and it's instantly placed into your scene!

On the asset store, right now!
http://u3d.as/content/wit-entertainment/asset-preview








(Actual assets seen in the screenshots not included)

 

Very clever !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

6R

 

To tell the truth, the tool was actually mostly written for my own use.
I just got so extremely frustrated one day trying to remember what our assets were called and wanted a more "visual" representation.
Turns out it was even more useful than I had imagined (cut down our time spent creating levels by a great deal!), so figured I would clean it up a bit and put it out there for everyone else to use too.

 

Kudos to you!

I wonder why nobody else had released this before!

 

Thanks!

Same here... can't live without it now.

 

I made something very similar to this in about 1-2 hours.. it's not worth $20 in my opinion.

 

When I see a product like this in the Asset Store, I use the following algorithm:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. if  (
3.         product.IsUseful(me)  
4.         product.price <= me.hourlyRate * me.GetHoursNeededToImplement(product)
5.     ){
6.     me.Purchase(product);
7. }
8.  

So it will be cheap or expensive depending on how much do you value your own time... but if you think you can make a better alternative for less money, I'm sure a lot of people would be willing to purchase your product instead of blikstad's product.

 

I don't want to take away his customers. Besides, my tool isn't released anyway and I'm not planning to do so. I was just giving him my honest opinion, my feedback, which is the price is a little high. You don't have to agree with it

 

This looks really neat. Is it primarily just for viewing 3D models or does it have some way of previewing other assets like audio and materials?

Also, as a side note, are you generating your baked lighting in Unity or with an external tool? The lighting/shadows on and around the trees in your screenshot are really nice.

 

It currently only previews meshes and prefabs. I will have a look and see if I can't support audio too, question is what it's supposed to do when you click on the preview?

The main reason for the tool is to get a list of assets that you can quickly instantiate into your scenes.

I suppose clicking an audio file could automatically create a gameobject with an audiosource attached. As said, will look into it!

The screenshots are from our next (so far unannounced) game, levels are set up in unity and lighting is baked with beast. (and a painstakingly set up lighting setup... beast is very nice to work with once you have your setup, it's pretty painful to work through getting it right in the first place though )

 

Alright... something like that?

 

Hey that's pretty neat. I do see your point about what to do when you click but I think making a new object would be a good compromise.

I mainly just like this way of previewing all assets as opposed to the tree view, hence why I asked about materials and audio. Maybe being able to right click and play an audio clip would be nice (since it's a little more appropriate for most people previewing to listen to a sound rather than look at the wave form). That said it's really cool that you got that wired up so quickly.

 

I would love to be able to read in all subdirectories, at the moment it does not load them in, I have many object in subfolders, would you be able to add this ability? thanks

And also it adds the object when I click, I would prefer the object to be selected in the inspector and be able to see it properties and then be able to drag the file into the sene.

 

Got this somewhat working, it's a bit of a "hack" honestly since apparently there's no real way to play audio in the editor. At least there's no access to the functions the regular audio preview use. But as said, have something that works, almost. Just need a bit of testing to make sure it doesn't break down (too often)

Reading subdirs, sure, will get that added.

This would be very counter productive for me personally. The point of the tool is to not have to use the Project view while building levels. But I have a few ideas how we can have our cake and eat it too. Stay tuned.

 

Version 1.2 have been submitted, so it'll probably show up on the asset store shortly!

Release notes:
1.2
You can now, optionally, include all subfolders when you add a path.
Added sound preview of AudioClips.
Clicking the name of the asset will take you to it in the Projects view.
Fixed a few minor issues.

 

Was going to buy this, but it does not have source. Not that I want to change it, but always good to have source so you are more "version safe" when Unity changes.

 

It's not really "compiled" as such. It's a .net assembly, mostly just for convenience and ease of distrubution.
Something like http://www.reflector.net/ should get you the code if you really need it.

 

Great update! , thanks for including the subdirectories!

I like that I can click on the name and then see the inspector!

The only thing missing for me would be dragging the objects in the scene view, This is quite essential for me as I don't want to place all the objects in the middle of the scene view. I can see why it would not be your preferred behavior, perhaps you can implement it as an option? or perhaps when pressing cmd/ctrl as a modifier key? so that would result in hold cmd and drag object in the scene.

This would still save me time now I do this:

1 select name in asset preview tool
2 find selected object in project view
3 drag in scene

then it would be

1 select while holding cmd and drag in scene.

I hope you can find a way to implement it without breaking your workflow! Thanks

 

The subdirectories are not loaded when I try it, I'm on a mac and the folders have spaces, not sure if this is related?

+ 1 on material and textures request and be able to drag from the asset preview tool into the game objects.
you could include a filter that enables disables textures materials, or even better a new tab/window for the textures.
Basically you could look at the maya multi lister and take some ideas from there.
Here's a screenshot:

 

Ah, right. I see what you mean.
You want full drag/drop from the preview. It may be rather involved to get that working smoothly, but I'll definitely look into it.

 

Hm... looking into it. Seem to be a few corner cases where it just plain doesn't work. grr.

 

1.3
Fixed issue with assets in sub folders not showing up.
Added drag-drop from the Preview window to the scene.


On it's way to the store....

 

Fantastic!!

 

.

Asset|Preview 1.3 is live on the asset store!


There will be a 1.4 too sometimes later this week if all go as planned.
It'll sport previewing of "everything" (with filtering so you can tell it to not show you things you don't want), a slightly cleaned up interface, and full drag-drop support (dragging materials or textures onto models for example. But basically and drag/drop operation that works in regular unity will work).

It's all more or less done, just need some more battle testing to make sure it all works properly.

 

Great update! , for me personally it would be better when I click on the icon that it loads in the inspector, could you make it an option?
now you have it when I click on the name but many times I accidentally click next to the name and then I placed an item in the scene when I just wanted to look at it.

The other thing I would like to change is the back ground color to transparent, so that it matches the light or the dark pro skin. at the moment the back ground it a bit dark when I use the bright unity interface.

 

Sorry, small (much needed! ) vacation, and lots and lots of work delayed things a bit.

1.4 have been submitted now at least, should show up soon hopefully. The jist of it is, slightly nicer looking interface, few bug fixes, previewing of textures/materials too and complete drag/drop support. (you can now drag stuff onto components, or drag materials or textures onto objects in your scene etc!)


1.4
Full drag-drop support. You can now drag stuff anywhere you drag objects from the project view. Including to variables on components, the scene view, dragging materials onto objects, etc.
Previewing textures and materials.
Filtering to only show what you want to see.
Interface cleaned up a bit.
Faster recreation of the asset previews.

 

I tried messing with the backgrounds, turns out there's no good way (as in, no way that's not REALLY slow) to do that. I get the previews that way from unity. So, sorry.

I added an unsupported option just for you to change the behavior when you click an asset though.
When 1.4 gets approved on the asset store, find Assets/Editor/AssetPreviewSettings and bring up it's inspector. There will be a checkbox there labeled "Click To Select In Project". Just check that and instead of instantiating into the scene, the object will get selected in the project when you click it.

 

Was approved quickly, so, should be live in the store already!

 

interesting, Im about to put alot of objects into some scenes, this really could speed up the process, hmmmm...nice!

 

Brilliant think i may have to buy this

 

Nice update!, Thanks for the included option!

 

in some folder I get an error when importing:

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
AssetPreviewWindow.UpdateAvailableMeshes ()
AssetPreviewWindow.OnGUI ()
System.Reflection.MonoMethod.Invoke (System.Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, System.Reflection.Binder binder, System.Object[] parameters, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture)

not sure why, but will try again.

 

I don't understand why something like this isn't built into Unity in the first place. Time to get my wallet ready.

 

Hello blikstad ,
simply genius plugin :

 

That doesn't sound good. Did you manage to isolate it down to a specific asset?
Feel free to send me any assets or folders that doesn't work btw and I'll see if I can sort it out.

 

Depending on various factors (I am not sure I really understand them all), some (most, actually) of my prefabs don't show up. I just get a blank button. In the Unity prefab picker, they show up as little blue cubes (though the little 3d preview is still in the lower left corner). Am I doing something weird with my assets or do Unity and AssetPreview not support most configurations of prefab?

 

If it shows up in the inspector in regular Unity when you select the prefab, it should work.
As said, if anyone have any issues with any specific assets, feel free to send them to me (magnus@witentertainment.com) and I'll have a look. Either there's something wrong and I can fix it, or you're doing something that doesn't work, which I'll be able to spot much easier by looking at it than guessing what it is you're doing

 

Thanks for the reply. I tried to get a repro to send to you, but... everything started working. Apparently, it only freaks out when I reconstruct the library for the whole project (after a fresh checkout for example). If I reimport the folder with most of the prefabs, everything starts showing up again. So I think some part of our import process is screwing with the asset previews.

 

Hi,
i bought the plugin yesterday but i keep receiving this error : method not found UnityEditor.EditorUtility.getAssetPreview..........

 

The same error. sad

 

Looking at the plugin page it seems it doesn't work with Unity 4.