Making the Unity layout work for you.
Objective: Set up a more professional layout to work with Unity.
When starting with Unity, getting to grips with the interface can be a bit daunting. This is more aparent when using the default layout that Unity starts with. This layout does have the perks of a nice simpler look with a nice big window to view the Scene or Game views but the switching back and forth can get old really fast.
Unity does provide some extra layouts but they don’t get it right. We will choose one of them to start organising the layout though so click where it says default up in the top right corner and choose Tall.
After making the selection the interface moves around moving the Scene/Game overlapping views to the left taking up nearly the full height of the window. The Hierarchy and Project panels move to the middle stacked on top of each other and the Inspector is on the right taking up nearly the full window height.
Next we pull the Game view and snap in under the Scene view staking them on top of each other. We then stretch the Game view panel up about have way leaving the same room for both Scene and Game views. If we were building a vertical style app or game, splitting the Scene and Game views in a side by side rather than stacked formation would probably be better but for now, stacked will probably be the most used case scenario.
At the moment the Project panel looks a bit overcrowded in the way its configured so on the top right corner of the panel click the drop down and select one column layout. This allows more access to the folders and file structures and is just an overall better aproach to dealing with the assets.
Finally to save the layout for future use, go up to the top right where Tall was selected earlier and click save layout. Give it a name (maybe Professional Layout)
Now the layout is saved you can toggle between the Unity default or other provided layouts or quickly get back to this newly saved layout if Unity does switch back itself. For the next post, it’s time to get moving with a project.
