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Install the Unity Hub and Unity LTS.

Overview

Name of explainer: Install the Unity Hub and install Unity LTS

Creative theme: VR development

Software used: Unity

User level: INTERMEDIATE

This is explainer 1 of 8 in this series

This series includes:

Install the Unity hub and Unity LTS
Download Oculus integration, create a new Unity project and set it up for VR
Install VRIF and send a VR scene to a Quest 2 headset
Import a low poly city scene and add a VR camera rig
Edit a 3d object so it can be interacted with in VR
Import and set up animated people to populate the city
Animate a police car to race around the city streets
Add a soundtrack and attach sounds to individual objects

The Software

This series of explainers uses Unity, one of the most popular real-time 3d development environments. It’s used by millions of creators to develop games, create animations and visualisations and even produce short movies. Need inspiration? Check out their showcase.

Unity Personal Edition is completely free. If you start to make money commercially from your Unity creations you’ll need to upgrade to a paid professional license.

Over the course of eight explainers we’re using Unity and various free and paid assets from the Unity asset store to test a workflow from Unity to a Meta Quest 2 headset, send a city scene to the headset and add objects we can interact with. We go on to add animated people and a speeding police car! Finally, we import an ambient soundtrack and attach sounds to specific objects.

Our city at the end of this series

This is how our city looks looks at the end of this series. Remember the environment is designed to be experienced in a VR headset and not viewed as a ‘flat’ video!

Welcome to Paradise City!

The pre-requisities

This is an INTERMEDIATE workflow explainer series. We’re starting from scratch so don’t worry if you’ve never used Unity, but you’ll find this series easier to follow if you have basic knowledge of the Unity interface and how to navigate a 3d scene.

If you’re new to IT / computing, this workflow series is not likely to be suitable. To get started with 3d software in a beginner-friendly environment, we recommend the free Tinkercad. See makeuseof for a helpful overview of 3d design and the specialisms available to you.

Why would I do this?

Unity is our core platform for this series of explainers. All the additional free and paid assets we go on to work with are designed for this platform. We’re using a unity ‘LTS’ build. This is short for ‘long term support’ and is the best option when learning Unity or working collaboratively on a project to avoid new features or software updates causing issues mid-project.

Let’s do it!

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Good to know

We use the term ‘Quest’ to refer to any device in the Meta Quest line-up. The processes we’re following will work with any Quest headset.

As Quest headsets run Android (like many phones), we need to install the Android developer files alongside the Unity editor.

Unity ‘LTS’ versions are not necessarily the ‘latest’ versions of the software. If you’d like to try out the newest features of Unity, feel free to also install the latest stable build. If you’re new to Unity we recommend only doing this after you complete this series of explainers.

Unity is not the only realtime 3d development environment on the block. The other ‘biggie’ is Unreal, which you can also start working with for free. If your interest lies in the photo-realistic graphics and complex environments associated with AAA games you many prefer to try out the Unreal pipeline…

Finally, the Godot engine is also gaining popularity and works well with Quest devices.

Where to next?

Remember, this is part of a series of explainers for this software – Join us again for the other explainers in the series 🙂

Notes and updates

There are no notes or advisories at this time. This video explainer was last updated in May 2022. This page was last updated in May 2022.

We at pixels.cool are not responsible for the content of any external webpages or software downloaded from third party sites. Links are included in good faith at the time of writing. All explainer content is compiled in good faith using processes and methods used by the team. Modern software offers users many ways to accomplish a single task, and for reasons of clarity we choose not to refer to multiple options. All computer users should run up to date virus / security software at all times to minimise risks of data loss.