As of Unity 3.0, there is no way to set animation playback speeds directly in the Editor. It can’t even be done through the Animation window! Crazy, right? Not that crazy, it turns out. The catch is, animation playback speeds are stored in AnimationStates that don’t get instantiated until we hit Play. So we have to set the speeds at runtime, usually in Awake or Update. Most of the time we end up putting that functionality in one or two scripts that do very specific things like controlling a character and that’s not scalable to all the other objects in our scene that have animations. What do we do?

Here’s one solution to this problem. We all know by now* that Editor scripts (of the Editor-class type) can be used to customize our Inspector views. First step is to create an Editor that targets the Animation component and simply add some sliders at the bottom of it for each animation held in the Animations list. Second step is to create an accompanying and generalized MonoBehaviour script that will assign the proper values from the sliders to the AnimationStates upon Awake and/or Update.

And here it is:

The two scripts at work here are:

- AnimationSpeedEditor.cs which appends our GUI controls to the end of the Animation component view in the Inspector. These GUI controls allow you to set different playback speeds for each animation clip in the Animations list.

- OverrideAnimationSpeeds.cs which overwrites the default animation speed of 1 with the values gathered from the sliders in the Inspector.

A couple important points:

The additional GUI controls get activated if and only if you have the OverrideAnimationSpeeds component attached to the game object that has the Animation component.
Also, you’re not going to see anything under the Animation speeds foldout if you don’t have any animation clips in the Animations list.

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Instructions:

• Download AnimationSpeedEditor.zip, which contains two script files: AnimationSpeedEditor.cs and OverrideAnimationSpeeds.cs.
• Place AnimationSpeedEditor.cs inside a folder named Editor in your project. Create the folder if it doesn’t exist. The other script file can be placed pretty much anywhere.
• Find or create a game object that has an Animation component attached, and add the OverrideAnimationSpeeds component to it. You should see the Animation Speeds foldout get added to the view of the Animation component (as seen in the picture above.)
• Open the foldout. If you have animation clips added to the Animations list of your Animation component, you’ll see sliders for each one. Use these sliders to set a starting speed for your animations. You can also use the sliders during Play mode and see the results immediately.

As always, contact me with any feedback or bug reports. You can PM me on the Unity Forums, catch me on Twitter, or shoot me an e-mail. E-mail address is in the About box down and to the left. Thanks, folks!

It’s hard to feel caught up with all that’s going on in the fast-growing Unity community. It’s especially tough to read those 30 odd page long announcement threads on the Unity Forums without some kind of life-support system attached to your heart, lungs, and liver. Hopefully, the following should make it easier on all of us.

Introducing, uniThreads, a Greasemonkey user-script that makes reading multi-page Unity forum threads easier by dynamically adding remaining replies so you don’t have to navigate to individual pages.

It works like this: Whenever you navigate to a Unity Forum thread, the script starts running in the background. When you scroll past the first-half of the page, the scripts starts fetching the replies found on the next page (if there is one.) When it detects that you’ve scrolled near the bottom of the page, it inserts the prefetched replies into the reply table, and places an indicator telling you which replies have been added and from which page. It does this for every page, allowing you to scroll your way down to the very last reply of the entire thread. How cool is that?

It’s oh-so easy to setup:

• If you’re using Google Chrome, all you need to do is click here (it points to the uniThreads.user.js file on my server) and Chrome will prompt you to install it as an extension.
• If you’re using Firefox, you’ll first need to install the Greasemonkey Extension from here. Restart the browser and then click here to prompt Greasemonkey to install the uniThreads.user.js script. You might need to hit Refresh once on the script page for the prompt to show up.
• If you’re using Safari 5, grab the extension package from here, unzip, and double-click to install it.
• It even works in Opera! Check out this short tutorial by monsieur Antonie Potgieter on how to install user-scripts.
• Now that you have the script installed, simply visit a Unity Forum thread and start scrolling.

I’m currently looking for a lot of feedback on this script. If you use it and run into issues or think of ways to improve the user-experience, let me know! You can PM me on the Unity Forums, catch me on Twitter or shoot me an e-mail. E-mail address is in the About box down and to the left.

A helping hand for those in need of consulting on Unity projects.

I will devote 5 hours every Friday to offer consulting to whomever might need it. Sign up form is on its way located here. In the meanwhile, read up on what I can help you with (in increasing order of complexity, or something like that) and how the consulting sessions will work.

• Unity Basics/Intro
• Art pipeline in Unity
• Scripting in Javascript and C#
• Making Physics obey!
• *new* Making 2D games in Unity
• Writing Editor scripts to enhance workflow
• Performance considerations
• Building to the iPhone
• Talking to Objective-C from Unity
• 3rd party package integration on iPhone (eg. OpenFeint)

My current plan is to hold these as one-hour sessions over Skype. Once the web-form is up So you sign up to one of the open hour slots and boom!.. free consulting for that hour. No hooks, no bullshit!

The hour-slots listed will be are GMT/UTC. You can do the math.

If in doubt, contact me. If in doubt as to how you can contact me, look in the About box at the lower-left corner.

Being able to extend the functionality of the Editor through Editor Scripts is one of the features I love the most about Unity. And now there is one more reason to adore it; it enabled me to fix this Pivot problem.

SetPivot.cs – view - download

If you want to give it a try, you’ll need to create an Editor folder under Assets (Project View) and place the script there. Once Unity is done compiling (should only take 2-3 seconds), you will see the Set Pivot menu item under the GameObject menu. If you have Unity 2.5+, you might want to dock the SetPivot window somewhere to keep it visible while playing with several objects.

There are a couple limitations with this initial version. As of now:

• You can only move the pivot inside the bounds (aka bounding box) of the mesh. It should take little modification to change this though.
• Pivot movement doesn’t work well with objects that have been rotated. Remember to move the pivot when the object has zero rotation on all three axes.

I intend to keep improving this script so if you have suggestions, send me a PM on the Unity forums. My forum name is VoxelBoy.

Unity Forum post – view

Unify Community Wiki page – view

• Bought my plane ticket home. Flying February 14th. One month left.
• Went to a bakery I haven’t been to before and had a delicious Maple Pecan Roll.

• Saw Avatar.
• Started thinking about writing my Stagnation Evacuation Plan.