📚Configuring Presets

How to create, organize, and customize presets

Advanced Presets are designed to work with any set of game objects and components. You can use this system to create custom presets particular to your project and workflow. Presets, as with any other assets, may shared with team members to facilitate collaboration and reuse.

Open the Advanced Presets Window using the shortcut Control + Alt + Shift + E

Editing Advanced Presets

Presets are primarily created and managed in the Advanced Presets Window.

Lock Toggle

Before any changes can be made to presets or configurations, the view must be unlocked by clicking the lock icon in the upper right corner.

Once unlocked, additional editing and configuration tools are made visible

Editing vs Config

You'll notice there are 2 aspects to modifying presets:

• Editing: Shows additional tools for creating and editing presets.

• Config: Shows options for editor behaviors and displays.

Configuration Settings

Click the gear icon to show the config settings for a collection, folder, or group.

Config settings have a hierarchical relationship: Global->Collection->Folder->Group

Global Config

As the name implies, this provides global settings for Advanced Presets throughout the project. The global config is stored as an asset in the project (AdvancedPresetsGlobalConfig). It can be edited directly by selecting the asset in the project view.

These settings are also displayed in the Advanced Presets Window when the gear icon is clicked.

Collection Config

When the gear icon in the main menu bar is enabled, it displays the config settings for the current collection and also shows the global config settings. Here you can change the display name of the collection, reveal its asset, and assign a custom icon and color.

The layout settings are covered in more detail below Layout Settings

Folder Config

Similarly, clicking the gear icon for a folder opens its config settings including the ability to specify a custom icon, color, and layout overrides.

Group Config

And then finally, clicking the gear icon for a group reveals its settings. Groups additionally provide an option to assign an asset folder containing Component Presets to display with the preset group. This field may also be left unassigned.

Name

Collections, folders, and groups each have a display name that can be customized. To edit names click the pencil icon.

Names of folders and groups can be edited inline directly where they are displayed.

Folder and group names are not editable unless editing is enabled (the pencil icon is toggled on)

Icon and Color

Every collection, folder, and group can have a custom icon and color.

You may import your own custom icons to use in the editor. A size of 16x16 or 32x32 is recommended with the following import settings.

Match Mode

When applying an Advanced Preset, this option determines how the preset hierarchy is matched to the target object hierarchy. There are 2 methods:

Match by Name

This matches objects from the preset hierarchy to the target hierarchy by exact name match. This method works best when the target hierarchy differs from the preset, but has objects that match in name.

Only objects with matching names are affected in this mode. All other objects will be ignored. If Add Children is enabled, any unmatched objects from the preset will be added anew to the target hierarchy, otherwise unmatched objects are effectively ignored.

Match by Sibling Index

This method matches the preset hierarchy to the target hierarchy by treating the hierarchy as a linear list, irrespective of object names. This mode is the most versatile and does not require names to match.

If the target hierarchy doesn't match the preset, either additional objects are added (if Add Children is enabled), or the extra objects are omitted.

Add Children

This option determines whether or not to add new objects to the target hierarchy when no matching objects are found. For example, if you apply a preset that contains children to a single game objects, new children will be added to complete the preset when it is applied. This option is usually best to leave enabled so that presets can be fully replicated on the target objects.

Unpack Prefabs

This option is only applicable when instantiated presets.

Determines whether prefab linking is preserved or if the new game objects are unlinked from the prefab when a preset is instantiated. Typically when working with prefabs, maintaining links to the prefab is desirable so that any changes to the prefab will update the instances. However, when applying presets it may be more desirable to instantiate new objects and keep them independent from the prefab.

Auto Hide Collections

When the project only contains a single AdvancedPresetCollection asset, this option allows the drop down menu for the Collection to be hidden since there is only 1 to select. This simply saves screen real estate when the collection menu isn't needed.

Rename Objects

When this option is enabled, it allows presets to rename the target objects and channels when applied. Otherwise, the target object and channel names are not affected by applying presets.

This option is toggled in the toolbar of the Advanced Presets Window by clicking the R icon

Set Track Colors

When enabled, the target object and channels will be assigned new track colors from the preset.

This option can be toggled in the main menu bar by clicking the paint bucket icon

Colored Headings / Buttons

Use these sliders to adjust the overall amount of color applied in the editor display of folders, groups, and preset buttons. You can fully remove color making it greyscale, or make it fully saturated, according to personal preference.

The color adjustments also carry over when applying presets if Set Track Colors is enabled.

Popup Size

This sets the default width (in pixels) of the Advanced Presets popup window, which is displayed when clicking the preset icons in the Timeflow view.

The presets popup window is an undocked floating version of the Advanced Presets Window. It operates mostly the same, however it retains its own layout and selection memory for context.

Editing is not permitted in the popup window. Click the gear icon to open an editable and dockable version of the Advanced Presets Window.

Layout Settings

These settings affect how presets are displayed, with configurable layout settings for collections, folders, and groups. Each level has the ability to override the layout settings to customize the display.

Layout Overrides

Enable the Override Layout option if you wish to enforce a particular layout for a collection, group, or folder. Overrides work hierarchically such that groups settings can override the folder, and folder settings can override the collection settings.

Example showing small button setup.

Example showing large button setup.

Adding Component Presets

Each group can optionally be assigned a folder containing Component Presets to display below the Advanced Presets. For example, the Tween group is shown below with an additional set of Component Presets. These provide additional configuration settings to quickly set commonly used value ranges and interpolation methods.

Component Presets can also be added to any group by simply dragging and dropping them from the Project view. The window must be in Edit Mode for the drop area to be visible.

Unlike Advanced Presets which are prefab-based, Component Presets store a collection of settings for a particular type of component. These settings may include all or only specific fields, allowing a lot of versatility.

For more information, see Component Presets