Agree.

Totally agree. I would love to see some more videos on this subject from you. Great work!

Thanks I really appreciate that! Brackeys is one of my favorites as well.

@@vectorbread don't worry bro if u keep making these cool videos am pretty sure u'll be there in no time Am just saying that bcuz i really love ur videos and many people will love ur work too

the hero we all need

Thanks

ty buddy

👍tankyou

Thank you!!! Saved my life from project

That's a great suggestion! I like that its a simple change which doesn't require any code.

For every single object the game will do a draw call. It's best to keep the draw calls to a minimum. Using the gameobject brush is fine and all, but should mostly just be used for prototyping an eviorment or sketching (unless your environment is really small then it don't really matter). If you want to optimize it you need to either make a copy of the tilemap in a program like blender or bind the meshes together into 1 with some coding. If you wanna challenge yourself do the latter since It's usually easier depending on what your doing and also a good learning experience about coding with 3D meshes.

Since your camera is going to be pointing at the ground, you could probably improve performance a lot just by enabling Unity’s built-in occlusion culling. Otherwise, because this is just scene geometry, you can mark the objects as static so that they get batched, which massively saves on draw calls. And then, if you’re still having problems, consider merging and baking the meshes so that they’re essentially treated as one big “ground” object instead of many objects.

Thanks @RepDev and @DisturbedNeo. I've since stuck with Unity's terrain tool since it seems more straightforward but will keep your advice in mind as I build up more experience moving forward.

Great question! It's not any better for performance. In the levels I've built I haven't run into any performance issues so I wouldn't rush to optimize it, but there are a lot of options if you need to. Some of the more common optimizations include having multiple versions of the 3D tiles with only the visible faces you need, writing a script to group all the tiles into chunks and enabling / disabling the groups based on the camera position, and finally writing a script to generate a custom mesh based on the tilemap data.

Thanks! Yeah if you `Instantiate()` your prefabs with the Tilemap as the parent and use the Tilemap's `GetCellCenterWorld()` function to calculate the world position of the prefabs.

@@vectorbread ooh that does work, thanks for the fast response !

I have found something helpful myself ;) you can use the 'Pick or select new brush (i)' tool in the toolbox. When clicking on a gameObject you can draw start drawing that object on other places on the grid. This makes it very fast. Also, the tilemap is just an editor tool. Every placed object is a normal gameObject as if it isn't placed with the tilemap. Which means you can move/rotate or do whatever with a gameobject after placing it in the tilemap.

@@mediabass that's really good

@@mediabass can you show where is toolbox please? I can't find it

Thank you! :D

Hi Ramon! Good question and unfortunately this video won’t help in your scenario. You’ll need to a script that figures out where the user has clicked on the tilemap and instantiates the prefab at that position. Here is an example script I made that does this: gist.github.com/vectorbread/fac2fcacec189cded8c7cc79e8a4fa50 It works by having a collider in your scene that represents the bounds of your tilemap. When the user clicks the screen it shoots a ray and sees where it lands on the collider. Then it converts that position to the center of the cell before instantiating your prefab.

@@vectorbread Thanks! I was tinkering with the internal ObjectBrush class that is used to paint objects via the UI and even got it to work by invoking it's Paint method, but that majorly messed with the physics loop and somehow seemed to break everything. Simply instantiating a prefab myself (at the correct position) works - thanks for the example :) The video is still super useful because I never knew you could swizzle the axis on the tilemap and that there even is the option to place real objects. That's really neat!

Hi Victor good question! Honestly the simplest approach is probably the best to start with. For every game object you use as a tile make it into a prefab and attach a collider for the tile. This will result in a ton of individual colliders, but if you use simple colliders like box colliders it probably won't be an issue for most games. Alternatively you can create a script to generate a mesh from scratch based on the tilemap you draw and you can rebuild this mesh from the scene view so it does not happen during the runtime. This will be more efficient and result in just 1 mesh, but there are lot more steps and its not something I can go over completely in a comment. This unity doc page has some examples of how to generate a mesh using a script as a starting point: docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Mesh.html Sadly there is not built in 3D tilemap or composite collider like there is for 2D tilemaps in Unity. Hopefully Unity will expand their tilemap functionality to work better in 3D.

I really appreciate that even if the video is one year old, you keep answering questions, it really helps a lot ! And wow, didn't expected an answer this quick ! Thanks !

They were in my video, but you can change the Cell Size of the Grid / Tilemap in the Inspector to a different size if you want.

@@vectorbread Thank you for responding to my question. This tutorial is really helpful for relatively new game designers!

Good question this method is just instantiating game objects. So each painted tile will have a separate game object. If you are worried about performance I would work on grouping the tiles into chucks and only show the chunks which are near the player during runtime. If you still see performance issues with chunks then, you'd likely need to create a custom 3D mesh based off the tilemap data instead of relying on tiles or gameobjects. Each of these performance enhancements can be time consuming to create, so I'd hold off until you really need them.

Yes it does work for hexgrids! If the brush is putting the model off center from the cell you clicked then play with the `Offset` and `Anchor` properties on your brush. I had to set both to 0 to make sure my model was put in the center of the hex cell.

@@vectorbread Thank you! Now it works :)

Hi Diogo! Unfortunately with this basic approach the Prefabs themselves are not considered Unity Tiles so we are placing them in the correct position, but the data in the Tilemap component is not being updated. I've made a Unity Component called `TileUnit` which will tell the Tilemap that the game object is taking up the tile at its position. Here is the `TileUnit.cs` File: gist.github.com/vectorbread/52ed2111f483a07e4a6520a116d6c1b7 If you add the `TileUnit.cs` file to your project and add the component to your Prefabs then the Tilemap will automatically have its data updated when you start the game.

@@vectorbread Ohh I get it now so that is how it is... Thank you a lot for your help!

@@vectorbread First of all, thanks a lot for the tutorial, it is great and straight to the point and has helped me a lot. I've used your script and now HasTile() returns true as expected, but tilemap.GetInstantiatedObject() does not return anything. Any chance do you have a suggestion? Thanks a lot

No its not optimized like 2D. I'd love for Unity to release an update with true Tilemap support for 3D. But you'll probably be surprised how far this unoptimized approach will go in a lot of games it will work fine. If you do run into issues the first optimization I would try is writing a script to group the tiles into chunks and hide and show chunks based on how close they are to the player.

Hey Docdoozer! If you want to set a Tile through code you need a Unity Tile object to pass to the Tilemap. You can create new Tile objects using this line of code: ScriptableObject.CreateInstance(); I have a helper class that I often use which I place on game objects under a Tilemap and it will automatically find the Tilemap it is under and create a new Tile object and set the Tile on Tilemap. Here is the helper class I use: gist.github.com/vectorbread/52ed2111f483a07e4a6520a116d6c1b7

@@vectorbread I was just about to ask the same thing! Thank you for sharing that script!

No unfortunately it doesn't. I'd love for Unity to introduce true 3D tilemaps so we can can get things like composite colliders. In my experience you can get a lot of box colliders in the scene before Unity starts to struggle. If you do do start having issues you can split your world up into chunks and hide the ones far from the player. Worst case you would have to write a custom script to generate the collider mesh from the tile data.

Hi Phatly the Tilemap Collider 2D only works for with the other 2D Colliders and if you have 3D models like the above video then you probably can't use it. You will probably want to use regular 3D Colliders on the individual game objects.

I usually make a new tilemap for each floor and set the offset on the brush to be the height of the floor I'm painting on. You can see me doing this at 2:31. I don't think you can 9-slice like 2D can. Unfortunately a lot features are missing when you try to use tilemaps for 3D. I hope Unity will release an update with better 3D support.

Also, can I use the grid to create some sort of tactical movement or is it just to paint?

Good question. Its certainly not an optimized approach so performance may eventually become an issue. But when I played around with it Unity had no problem with pretty large amounts of tiles, so I would not worry about performance for most games. If you end up building a truly massive open world game with 3d tiles then you'll want to add a script which will group the tiles into chunks and only show the closest chunks to the player (which is pretty standard for any large map in a video game).

Yeah they are normal game objects so you can put any custom scripts you want on them and after painting them you modify their properties individually if you want. Also you can make prefabs of game objects with different custom data and paint which ever prefab you want so they don't all have the same starting data.

Great question unfortunately I don't know of a better approach yet. Ideally Unity will come out with a version of the Tilemap with 3D in mind which has a more natural way to handle multiple levels.

I'm not sure, but I'd guess its because the Game Object brush does not work with the FloodFill option for the Tilemap (or at least it doesn't work in all versions of the Tilemap Extensions). Likely it won't work unless someone made a custom version of the brush to fill out the FloodFill functionality.

I think you're asking if the channel is monetized. It's not because you need 1000 subs to be able to monetize. It is indeed UKposts's rules forcing ads on the video. From what I understand once I hit 1000 subs I can manually turn off ads on each video, but I hear it won't show up in search results much anymore if I do that. If I get that many subscribers I'll try turning the ads off or putting the ad at the very end so people can just watch without waiting for an ad.

@@vectorbread New Rule sucks , Bruh

Yes they are still loaded by the computer. If you wanted to improve performance you could write a script to group the cubes into chunks and hide / show the chunks depending on the distance / direction from the camera. But I would avoid adding this extra logic until you start seeing issues in performance. Usually the computer can handle a lot more cubes than we'd expect.

@@vectorbread thks

Hi Ceren did you also install the "2D Tilemap Extras" package? That package should have the brushes in it, but it is hidden by default in the Package Manager see 0:29.

It didn't show up for me either and it turned out to be because I was using a ver of Unity from 2019 or so, when I did the same search on a ver from 2022 the extras package showed up.

I haven't heard of this before but I can try to help. What version of Unity are you using? Can you share a screenshot somewhere? You can DM me on twitter if that helps twitter.com/VectorBread

Good question!! At first I thought the Orientation property on the GameObject Brush should rotate the game objects, but when I tried it out today it was using a Quaternion to set the rotation which is pretty unintuitive from the Editor. So unfortunately with the latest version of the Tilemap Extras I don't see an easy way to rotate the tiles. You can manually rotate the GameObjects after placing them or you can place your GameObject under another parent GameObject and rotate it under the parent in the Prefab editor then paint the parent GameObject.