Become a better Unity developer with these tips from the community

Every Tuesday, Unity users share their best tips on Twitter with the #UnityTips tag. We’ve put together a list of the top tips from the past four months to help you enhance your visuals and improve your workflows. Get ready to take your Unity skills to the next level!

Enhance your visuals

Even if you’re not an artist, these tips will up your graphics game to help your project stand out from the pack and get noticed.

• Use Shader Graph to create a stylized waterfall shader. 
• If you’re using the built-in renderer and you prefer writing shader code, this tip shows you how to create a stylized water shader.
• MudBun is an impressive package for building real-time volumetric effects. See what’s possible through these volumetric water particles.
• For more technical users, check out this advanced approach to building your own fluid particle rendering system.
• Tired of that default Unity lighting look? Follow this guide to see how you can remove it, and learn a little more about Unity lighting along the way.
• Here’s a simple way to fake background volumetric lighting using line renderers.
• Learn about fur shells for a simple hair and fur effect.
• Try this easy way to add simple outlines to your mesh with Shader Graph.
• Learn how to add color to your shadows using raytracing in Unity.
• You can animate vertices in Shader Graph using the new Master Stack.
• If you’re interested in raytracing, why not check out this 60-second raytraced reflections tutorial?
• See here how you can make your objects disintegrate.
• Learn how to outline selected objects using command buffers.

Enhance your Editor workflow

In case you missed it, the Unity Editor has had some great improvements in 2020, and you can further customize and tweak it using these tips to do your work faster and smarter than ever before.

• You can define your automatic naming scheme for duplicate objects. 
• Scripting defines are now displayed as an Inspector array, which is much nicer to use than the old comma-separated list.
• Presets are a convenient new feature that you can use to quickly copy default parameters between objects. 
• Check out the device simulator to more accurately test your UI across multiple devices.
• Did you know you can use these built-in tags to automatically remove objects from your build?
• Did you know that the Particle Editor has handy keyboard shortcuts?
• Try this free custom hierarchy package to keep your game object hierarchy organized.
• Missing a project’s Unity version? Rather than looking through the download archives, try this Unity Hub feature to install Unity versions with one click.
• There’s an experimental project setting that allows you to jump into playmode instantly by disabling the automatic domain reload.

Tips for programmers

Programmers will appreciate these handy little shortcuts and code snippets. Tuck these away in your code arsenal so you’ll be ready the next time you encounter one of these situations.

• Use these snippets to calculate a random point on a circle or sphere.
• Use this code to convert between radians and degrees.
• Did you know you can add functionality to enums with extensions? 
• You can use name of to reference your fields in Inspector field scripts for easier code maintenance.
• If you like to keep your serialized fields private, you might try these different ways to fix that pesky 0649 warning.
• If you use interfaces, you’ve probably struggled with the reference still being valid, even when the underlying object is null. Here’s a nice way to fix that problem.
• Did you know you can accurately predict physics trajectories by separately simulating the physics?
• Did you know Unity has a physics debugger? You can use it to find invisible triggers or solve confusing collision issues.
• This is a clever way to automatically distribute an expensive function over multiple instances of the same object.

We hope you learn something new from these helpful tips. For more, search for the #UnityTips hashtag on Twitter, and you can also get involved with the community by sharing your own tips and best practices every Tuesday. Don’t forget to follow @Unity3d for a weekly #UnityTips Tuesday reminder!