Introduction
Creating a player controller in Unity 3D is an essential step towards building any 3D game. It’s the heart of your game, where all the action happens, and it’s where you’ll spend most of your time as a developer.
In this guide, we will take you through the process of creating a player controller in Unity 3D. We’ll start with the basics, such as setting up a new project and creating a character, before diving into more advanced topics like movement, input, and collision detection. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a fully functional player controller that you can use in your own games.
Setting Up Your Project
Before we start building our player controller, we need to set up a new project in Unity 3D. Open up Unity Hub and create a new 3D project. Choose the template that best suits your needs, whether it’s a 2D or 3D project, and click on “Create.”
Once your project is created, open it up in Unity Editor. The first thing you’ll see is a scene view, which shows your current scene. You can use this to create the environment for your game, add objects like trees, rocks, and buildings, and position your character.
Creating a Character
Now that we have our project set up, let’s create a character for our player controller. In Unity, you can create characters using various methods, such as importing pre-made models or creating them from scratch. For this tutorial, we’ll use the latter method.
To create a character from scratch, go to GameObject > 3D Object > Sphere. This will create a basic sphere object in your scene view. You can then resize and shape it using the transformation tools in the editor.
Next, we need to give our character some basic movement capabilities. To do this, we’ll use the Rigidbody component, which simulates physics-based movement for our character. Go to Component > Physics > Rigidbody, and add it to your character object.
With the Rigidbody component added, our character can now move around in the scene view. However, it’s not very controllable yet. We need to add some input controls so that our player can control the character’s movement.
Input Controls
Input controls allow players to interact with your game by using various inputs, such as keyboard or controller buttons. In Unity, you can add input controls using the Input component. Go to Component > Input and add it to your character object.
Once the Input component is added, we can map various input actions to our character’s movement. For example, we can use the WASD keys on the keyboard to move the character forward, backward, left, and right. To do this, go to Project Settings > Input > Axis and assign each axis a different key combination.
With our input controls set up, our player controller is now fully functional. Our character can move around in the scene view using the WASD keys on the keyboard. However, there’s still more we can do to make our player controller even better.
Movement and Collision Detection
Moving our character around is great, but we also need to make sure that it interacts with the environment in a meaningful way. This means adding collision detection to our player controller so that it can detect when it collides with other objects in the scene.
To add collision detection, we’ll use the Box Collider component, which creates a rectangular box around our character object. Go to Component > Physics > Box Collider and add it to your character object.
Once the Box Collider is added, we can set up collision detection by going to Project Settings > Physics > Layers and assigning our character object to a specific layer.