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ProBuilder 2 Documentation
6-23-2014; v2.2.5

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Table of Contents


Helpful Links and Info

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Video Tutorials: Please, take a short break to watch the video tutorials before using ProBuilder or Prototype. Make a sandwich, relax and watch the tutorials, you’ll be an expert in no time!

Official Unity Forums Thread: Leave testimonials, share your experiences with ProBuilder 2.0, showcase your art, and just say “Hi!” to the Unity community. Please do, since it really helps us spread the word and make ProCore even better!

ProCore Forum: Ever-expanding and resource-rich, with a very helpful and active community. Whatever you need take a look for it here, and if you can’t find it, start a thread to ask! Especially if you have an error, bug, or issue that needs fixing, it’s best to post it on the forums.

Beta Testing Group: Available to all registered ProBuilder users! You will receive a link upon registering, and can then request to join.


Overview

ProBuilder is an editor extension for the Unity 3D game engine, one that brings some very exciting and powerful new features to the engine. With ProBuilder, you can finally build, edit, and texture custom geometry with an extremely fluid, intuitive, and fast workflow. You can even manipulate UV direction, tiling, offset, rotation, and more.

Using ProBuilder, you can also quickly setup very efficient collision and occlusion, and trigger volumes for events, switches, and zones.

NEW: Prototype is the core of our ProBuilder, stripped for speed and simplicity. Using Prototype, you can quickly build great looking early-stage structures, props, walls, bunkers, vehicles, virtually anything at all. Test and tweak instantly, then replace with final models once your artists catch up- if they can! Prototype also includes ProBuilder’s ability to quickly colorize faces without adding a single draw call, so you can designate team areas, or just get creative with colorful dev textures.

Important: All items described here are included in ProBuilder, however only some are included in Prototype. Check for the "(PT)" - this means the item is also included in Prototype. Otherwise, it is only available in ProBuilder.

Whatever your project, Prototype or ProBuilder can accelerate its development, ease your stress, and ultimately allow you to ship a better finished project. Give it a try, you’ll wonder how you ever worked without it!


Installing and Upgrading

WARNING: The upgrade process is NOT reversible, and if an error occurs, you will almost certainly lose all your work. Make a backup of your entire project!

Step 1: Import the Unity Package

Step 2: Select Install Type

NOTE: If you are upgrading an existing ProBuilder project, the install process should automatically begin with no interaction necessary. If the install window opens, this typically means that the install script cannot locate the old ProBuilder installation. Please make sure that the older ProBuilder folder is located at the path "Assets/6by7/ProBuilder".


Interface Overview

Opening the GUI Panel

In order to begin creating with Prototype or ProBuilder, you’ll need the GUI Panel open. This is done by selecting, from the top menu bar in Unity “Tools > [name of package] > Open Probuilder Window”

This will open the GUI Panel, which you can leave floating, or dock. We recommend docking in a vertical position with minimal horizontal size, to use the least amount of space.

Using the GUI Panel

The UI is built to use up very little space on your screen, but still have all the functionality you will need for 98% of construction. The following is a description of each item in the GUI panel, from top to bottom:

Coordinate Space: This button controls and displays the coordinate space currently being used for editing geometry.

Editing Modes (PT) : When working with ProBuilder, you are always in one of three modes: Object Editing, Geometry Editing, or Texture Editing.

The following is a list of all Editing Modes and their uses:

More Details: See the “Building and Editing Geometry” and “Textures and UVs” sections

ProBuilder GUIPanel Continued:

new-shape Create New Shape (PT) :

merge Merge Objects:

lightmap Lightmap Generation Settings:

extrude Extrude (PT) :

mirror Mirror:

flip-normals Flip Normals:

subdivide Subdivide:

set-pivot Set Pivot:

vertex-colors Open Vertex Color Panel (PT) :

visgroups VisGroups (PT) :


Keyboard Shortcuts

ProBuilder 2 can be almost entirely keyboard-driven, which keeps the GUI clean, and workflow very fast. Even better, nearly every keyboard shortcut, and many other settings, can be customized! Just open "Edit > Preferences > ProBuilder" . Below is a “cheat sheet” of all default keyboard shortcuts.

Shortcut Description
Ctrl - K New Cube (PT)
Ctrl - Shift - K New Shape (PT)
G Enter Geometry Edit Mode (PT)
H Toggle Between Face, Edge, and Vertex Manipulation (PT)
P Toggle Handle Coordinate Alignment
J Open Texture Edit Mode
N Set Selected face(s) to NoDraw
Escape Exit Texture or Geometry Mode (PT)
M Set selected objects to Mover Entity Type
B Set selected objects to Detail Entity Type (PT)
O Set selected objects to World Entity Type
T Set selected objects to Trigger Entity Type (PT)
C Set selected objects to Collision Entity Type (PT)
Ctrl-Shift-Left Click In Texture mode, paint selected material to clicked face
Ctrl-Shift-E Extrude selected face(s) (PT)
Ctrl-E Extrude selected face(s) with translation (PT)
Ctrl-J Set pivot to center of selection (vertex, face, or object)
Ctrl-Shift-I Invert selection (PT)
Alt-(0-9) Paint selected face(s) to color preset (Vertex Colors Menu) (PT)
Shift (Drag/Rotate/Scale) Hold shift while scaling, rotating, or moving to extrude selected faces. (PT)
Backspace Delete selected face(s)
Alt + C Collapse selected vertices
Alt + V Weld selected vertices
Alt + X Split selected vertices
Alt + B Bridge selected edges
Alt + R Select Edge Ring
Shift + Alt + G Grow Selection
Shift + G Grow Selection Plane
Alt + N Flip Face Normals
Alt + U Insert Edge Loop
Alt + E Connect selected vertices or edges

Menu Items

A list of all Menu Items available:


Building and Editing Geometry

The Basics

In the previous section, we went over the technical details of how to construct and edit geometry with ProBuilder. Before you jump right in though, you should definitely watch the ProBuilder “Intro to Modeling” tutorial- it’s fairly quick but extremely informative. Here, we’ll go over some basic tips, tricks, and advice for modeling with ProBuilder 2.0:

Advanced Geometry Operations


Textures and UVs

Note: the Texture and UV controls of ProBuilder are currently being completely rebuilt. Expect a much more powerful and intuitive feature-set very soon!

Overview

ProBuilder’s Texture and UV Tool panel is opened when you enter Texture Edit mode, by hitting “J” on your keyboard. This panel allows “painting” of materials onto your ProBuilder objects, and even allows painting a different material on each and every face, should you need to.

Secondly, it allows you to change how a material is displayed on individual faces of your ProBuilder objects, without editing the material itself. This means you can create infinite variations, with just a single draw call.

The Texture and UV Panel

Applying Materials (“Texturing”)

First, a note on definition and methodology: somewhere along the way in game engine development, the difference between “Texture” and “Material” became a source of much confusion and misinterpretation. In the case of ProBuilder, just know this- nothing special at all is happening with materials or textures. You apply materials to your ProBuilder objects just like any other object, and those materials will act/display just the same, as well.

That aside, there are several ways to apply materials in ProBuilder. All of the following methods assume you are already in Texture Edit mode, and have a material set in the Material Slot of the Texture and UV Tools panel:

Editing UVs

Being able to edit the individual UVs of each face on a ProBuilder Object, allows for virtually infinite variation and re-use of textures. This is great for both performance and making your scene look great!

Texture Groups

New in 2.2.2 is the ability to mark multiple faces as sharing a single texture group. This allows ProBuilder to project UVs simultaneously across these faces, resulting in seamless UVs. There are some limitations to this method however; primarily the caveat that this method will only work with faces that share a like plane.


Colorizing

"Colorizing" allows you to color individual faces when using a material that supports Vertex Colors. With this method, you can quickly add color and variation throughout your map, without changing materials or adding drawcalls.

The Vertex Color Panel (PT)
colorize


VisGroups and Entity Types

All ProBuilder objects have an Entity Type, or simply “type”. These are basically categories, like “Melee, Ranged, Explosive, etc”- they set certain properties in the object, and how it acts in your game.

VisGroups (PT) are simply a very handy side effect of using these Entity Types. Since all ProBuilder objects have a type, and you generally don’t need to see all types at once, you can use the VisGroups panel to toggle the visibility on or off for each “group” of types. This becomes extremely useful as your scenes become more and more detailed/complex.


Optimization

ProBuilder 2 is very efficient on it’s own- in fact it is 6x more efficient than ProBuilder 1.x without any work on your part, due to using a single mesh per object now. On top of that, we expanded the already existing optimization methods, and added a few new ones- all of which are simple to implement, and will significantly aid your project.


Lightmapping

ProBuilder automatically generates perfectly sized, normalized, UV2 channels for each and every ProBuilder Object. Hurray! However, there are a few items to keep in mind when lightmapping:


Smoothing Groups

Smoothing groups average the vertex normals with neighboring planes. This allows lighting to behave in a more realistic manner when dealing with edges that are intended to be smooth.

smoothing_example


Customizing


Hints & Tips


Changelog

ProBuilder 2.2.5f5

ProBuilder 2.2.4f0

ProBuilder 2.2.3f0

ProBuilder 2.2.2f4

ProBuilder 2.2.0f4

ProBuilder 2.1.4

ProBuilder 2.1.3

ProBuilder 2.1.2

ProBuilder 2.1.1

ProBuilder 2.1