Scene View Camera Speed

Alright, this is a little bit of a salty subject for me, so bear with me. I've been using Unity since version 3.2, professionally since about 3.5, and I've had many complaints with the engine that have been fixed or at least mitigated in that time. However, one feature that has been persistently and entirely ignored by the Unity Technologies dev team is the Scene View's camera. So here's a list of complaints, and suggestions to fix them. I know that comparisons to Unreal are often apples to oranges with Unity, but there will be several references used as examples.

• Camera Move Speed
  • This one's one of my biggest issues with unity in general, and definitely the biggest issue with the scene view. Currently, the camera goes at two speeds, fast and super fast. The lowest speed I can go is about 5m/s, and it slowly speeds up on top of that. This is not practical in the least for dealing with smaller scale things like individual rooms. On top of that, the claim that this helps with larger scenes seems very inaccurate as well, as my scenes of 1km or more are always a pain to navigate due to the camera being much too slow. A little bit of Goldilocks syndrome, lol.
  • A solid way to fix this is the give the user the ability to slow the camera down via scrolling while holding right mouse or moving around, in addition to a slider somewhere on the UI for fine tuned control. An example is Unreal's camera control in the upper right of it's viewport UI.
    This solution allows the user to have absolute control over the speed of the camera, rather than either waiting on it to speed up or doing the fiddly task of moving around a smaller room.
• Camera Clipping plane.
  • The near clipping plane is a little difficult to control in it's current state. It seems to depend on the "zoom level" of the camera, but the zoom level is often somewhat arbitrarily controlled.
  • Again, a slider on the scene view UI would help a lot with this.
• (F)ocus
  • Pretty sure this is a bug. When I hit F in Unity 5.6, I zoom away instead of closer to the object. If it focused to the bounding box of the object I'm looking at that would be wonderful, but it usually does about 100x that. Not even hyperbole, I have a object that is 0.1m wide, if I hit F, I zoom out to ~50m away from it. It's about 10px wide at that distance..
• Orbiting
  • Currently, the camera orbits around a point that looks to be about 10m away.
  • I would suggest tying the orbit distance to the current camera speed mentioned above, or perhaps always orbit around the surface at the center of the screen like Substance Painter.
• Object Placement.
  • When I place an object in the scene via the GameObject menu, it tends to be a long ways off in the direction the camera was facing. It doesn't even try to place it on the surface I'm looking at.
  • To go slightly off topic from camera controls, the GameObject context menu seems very archaic in the first place. A tray of all of those objects that I can drag and drop from would likely be much more intuitive and powerful. We have the Project view, but that's not so good for just placing a sphere or cube in the scene. Once again, an example is Unreal's object pallet. While I don't think that it is anywhere near a perfect implementation, it does have the general idea right.

Thanks for reading my super long post, and I hope I helped some change for the better come around soon!

 

Dude, I completely agree with all of this. -- No idea wtf nobody else has any issues with this...

Anyone else alive out there??


Thanks for trying @CPTechnologies -- just know someone else cares enough about Unity to mention this!

 

Mystifying that these bugs/UX howlers are still around. After all this time.

 

Hear, hear! Believe it or not, my reason for visiting the forum right now was the above issue, which no amount of Google searching seems to have helped me resolve. I am testing the 2017.2 beta's new Substance 6 support, and so I have objects in my scene and need to zoom really close to examine the materials. The only way I've been able to manage that is to hold down Alt and right-button drag, a real pain in the butt. I agree with your suggestion for a held key to make the scrolling very slow. How about SHIFT? (Plus the preference setting which you suggest.)

Totally agree with you on both of these points.

I slightly disagree here. I think the camera in orbit mode ought to orbit around the origin of the selected object, or the geometric mean of the origin points of multiple selected objects, maintaining the same distance as it had before the user pressed the key to enter orbit mode.

Agreed.

 

Camera speed is always an irritation. I don't often run into the too fast issue, but too slow is quite a headache with my large scenes. The maximum zoom out distance is also a minor gripe.

 

You should repost this in the Official Feedback thread -- I've already posted, but if more people post, they might take this issue more seriously!


Also, if anyone's interested:

I wrote an asset that has been released in the Asset Store that will alleviate the camera speed issue for back and forth zipping around your scenes.

I hope it will be as useful to you as it is to me!

 

I have the opposite problem. When working on a huge terrain, I find the camera is too slow! I'd love a speed slider for when I'm switching between detail work and world-scale work.

 

Yes, seriously what the f--k are they going. I'm working on a huge terrain and navigation is extremely slow and frustrating, almost unworkable. WAKE UP dammit and expose the camera speed parameter already! i can see hundreds of threads about this on google, extremely annoying that this has been ignored for so long. Imagine how many man hours has been wasted on such a trivial thing.

 

@awesomedata, i half expected that to be free, but of course everyone have to monetize Unity's complete failure to build a working editor in 10 years.

 

@nights007

I agree with your sentiments entirely. I'd totally give it away for free if Unity wanted to pay me for its use, but, sadly, I really can't give it away right now -- I'm just trying to keep the bills paid (and not doing an entirely great job at it...) so I do have to monetize anything I can at the moment. I'm really sorry.


There is one thing that would allow me to give it away for free -- if you made a youtube video demonstrating its use while building your game levels, just showing off its general usefulness in placing gameobjects or navigating your scenes and things like that, then allow me to use that to advertise Snapcam, I'd be inclined to offer a free copy/license in exchange for that and potentially a review.

Another way to get a free copy/license of Snapcam is to make a blog or website post (or advertise Snapcam) creatively in some way that could get quite a few eyes on it. If anyone would want to tackle either task, I'll give away up to 2 free copies of "Snapcam Navigator" for help on either if whatever you did really can promote it better or at least give it better visibility in the market!

 

Hey guys! Sorry I disappeared after posting this thread, I have been working on a super long and tough crunch lately and haven't been on the forums at all. Nice, @awesomedata! I agree with @nights007 that it's frustrating that Unity hasn't done this and is actively profiting off the lack of features, but I totally understand your position, having been in it several times at this point! I will look into getting your asset for sure! Unity will likely take months to get around to this at the very least, if not years, so I'll need a replacement for the time being.

Also, I posted the OP to the Feedback section as recommended, with the change to the orbit cam suggestion mentioned by @syscrusher, as I agree completely with it. Here's the link:
https://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/scene-view-navigation-and-ux-improvements

 

@Birdlay
Thanks for your support! It really means a lot to me!

Speaking of which, I updated Snapcam with some nifty new features for an even faster workflow. Take a peek!

(Edit: Fixed volume issue hopefully...)

 

Having not seen both sets of source code, I can't comment on the preceding post one way or the other, but this did remind me that Snapcam solves a problem that I have complained about, but I hadn't gotten around to buying it yet. So, @awesomedata, as one asset publisher to another you just got yourself another sale for today.

I'm working on a very large cinematic render right now, the most complex scene I've ever built in Unity, so I can really use Snapcam's features for moving around this beast.

 

Sorry but your post looks like a spam, very inappropriate.
it took few hours to code this script and people will agree that's simple enough.
I've never bought anything from the store and i'll never do

I don't follow the unity forum (you can see from my messages count), i just made a simple script for myself and shared there to help other people (download count? are you serious?).
If your asset is such simple you should not sell this kind of things.
Improve it and add features to make it valuable and don't blame other people if you don't make money.

 

No, sorry man, Snapcam is not that simple to be outdone by a simple script, but THAT is not the issue -- the issue is that you never addressed any of my points about our code being so similar as well as our approaches to movement in the scene view, nor did you address the timely release of your project less than a day /after/ my update to Snapcam 2.0 with viewport navigation. Additionally, you call my valid concerns "spam". Care to address these issues?

Additionally, for an apparently entitled person who does not appreciate the value of the effort developers go through to create assets that are both useful and feature complete, it's clear you don't support developers. However, to take credit for the hard work yourself, that's a special kind of disgusting, so props to you for clearly having no idea about the wrongs of your actions.


@syscrusher

Also, thank you @syscrusher for your support! I really do hope Snapcam is something you enjoy! From my personal experience with Snapcam, the view navigator is my favorite feature (and will only get better as I develop it!).




Either way, @everyone:

I apologize to everyone here for being so forward about this, but something has to be said when things like this happen. I had actually planned to release a free version of Snapcam but then found a guy making money off my snap points idea, and now this -- and as I see it, there's no way this guy could have made this script in just a few hours with no concrete examples of Unity's internal processing of the scene camera or constant keyboard events. It took me a solid month dedicated to trial and error work to figure these things out that most who have tried thought it impossible in the end. That's why you find no camera movement assets that pre-date Snapcam's release.

Anyone want to check that fact? This guy lies about this being his achievement and then proceeds to call my concerns spam simply because I called him out on it.
I could be wrong though about him lying, and if I am, I can own up to it.

Then again, he /is/ welcome to offer facts that refute my points. I just don't think they exist. Maybe he can prove me wrong and render my suspicions inert?

I'm listening.

 

Can you send me a private message with that code? you are accusing me of stealing your code to publish it for free,
Why should i do such a thing?

I just reproduced the unity camera movement, i don't understand your point. if "speed += acceleration" is such a big feature you should change job.


"The same 3 customizable variables": what variables do you want to customize? camera speed, camera acceleration and speed change when you are pressing shift. Oh it's just like what does unity. Everyone with a simple logic can figure out these 3 parameters

"keyboard movement checking": it's the standard way to manage keyboard check, there is no other way to check if a button is pressed. and the repeat check is solved with a thing called debugging. (the cam moves weirdly -> insert a Debug.Log -> find where's the problem -> fix adding a check)
If you make a game where a player goes forward you check if the player is pressing W, and if someone makes a player that moves forward like yours you can't accuse him for just writing "Input.GetKey(Keycode.W)", this is just ridicolous.

"there is no way to move the scene camera in a smooth way in OnScendGUI"
It's just a change of the scene pivot and rotation, just like every other unity transform, i guess you are new to this tool

Look, from 2015: https://forum.unity.com/threads/how-do-you-move-the-camera-on-editor-with-preview.327029/

1. SceneView.lastActiveSceneView.pivot = script.cam.position;
2. SceneView.lastActiveSceneView.rotation = script.cam.rotation;
3. SceneView.lastActiveSceneView.Repaint();

You are scamming people with your 28$ copied around code.
Sorry for saying that but this is my last message, don't have more time to waste

 

This is something that should probably be further discussed via PM (as you suggested.)

If you're willing to get into specifics with me of why you chose this timing, then I am willing to hear you out. -- Despite your criticisms of both me and my work, I'm not out to make you my enemy. I am only wanting an explanation.

I am really hoping I am wrong and that this is just a big misunderstanding, but the timing was what set off my alarm bells and that still hasn't been addressed. That being said, it's still possible this was all just a majorly (unfortunate!) coincidence.


Also, I've thought about it more, and despite whether or not you "stole" anything to produce what you did, or how suspicious the timing was, I'm not going to further begrudge you the chance to make camera movement free for everyone. I know what it's like to want and need and not have the money to pay.

The only thing I will ask is that you remove the ability to add "snap" points from your editor script. This is the essence of the original Snapcam product and it is indeed copyrighted. In return, I will release a free version of Snapcam (that has a better implementation of this concept.) If you really aren't such a bad guy, this would be the way to prove it.

Thanks for responding to my other points. Any further communication or discussion should be done by PM. Thanks for understanding.

Sorry for any trouble or undue stress I may have caused anyone throughout our exchange. Hopefully we can work something out as we discuss this in private from here on.

 

Switching to PM.