🎥 Fork of the excellent UnityExplorer mod made by sinai-dev focused on providing tools for creating marketing material for Unity games.
To see the forks features I have worked on so far check out the Features section.
✔️ Supports most Unity versions from 5.2 to 2021+ (IL2CPP and Mono).
✨ Powered by UniverseLib
Trailer showcasing the fork features
Nightly builds can be found here.
Release | IL2CPP(CoreCLR) | IL2CPP(Unhollower) | Mono |
---|---|---|---|
BIE 6.X be.647+ | ✅ link | ✖️ n/a | ✅ link |
BIE 6.X be.472 to be.577 | ✅ link | ✅ link | ✅ link |
BIE 5.X | ✖️ n/a | ✖️ n/a | ✅ link |
plugins/CinematicUnityExplorer
folder and place it in BepInEx/plugins/
Note: BepInEx 6 is obtainable via builds.bepinex.dev
Release | IL2CPP | Mono |
---|---|---|
ML 0.6.x | ✅ link | ✖️ |
ML 0.6(only alpha build) | ✅ link | ✖️ |
ML 0.5 | ✅ link | ✅ link |
Mods
folder into your MelonLoader Mods
folderUserLibs
folder into your MelonLoader UserLibs
folderIL2CPP | Mono |
---|---|
✅ link | ✅ link |
The standalone release can be used with any injector or loader of your choice, but it requires you to load the dependencies manually.
CinematicUnityExplorer.Editor
release if you need them.UnityExplorer.ExplorerStandalone.CreateInstance();
ExplorerStandalone.OnLog
event to handle logging if you wishCinematicUnityExplorer.Editor
release.package.json
file, or by manually dragging the folder into your Assets
folder.Runtime/CinematicUnityExplorer
prefab into your scene, or create a GameObject and add the Explorer Editor Behaviour
script to it.Although CinematicUnityExplorer should work out of the box for most Unity games, in some cases you may need to tweak the settings for it to work properly.
To adjust the settings, open the config file:
BepInEx\config\com.originalnicodr.cinematicunityexplorer.cfg
UserData\MelonPreferences.cfg
CinematicUnityExplorer\config.cfg
Try adjusting the following settings and see if it fixes your issues:
Startup_Delay_Time
- increase to 5-10 seconds (or more as needed), can fix issues with CinematicUnityExplorer being destroyed or corrupted during startup.Disable_EventSystem_Override
- if input is not working properly, try setting this to true
.If these fixes do not work, please create an issue in this repo and I'll do my best to look into it.
I wrote a guide explaining different things regarding the Cinematic Unity Explorer over the Framed website, from knowing what version to download with your game and troubleshooting, to usage and tips and tricks. Feel free to create a PR on the Framed GitHub repo if you want to improve it.
The table below describes all of the relevant default hotkeys. You can edit them to your liking by going to the Options panel, changing the hotkeys you want, and saving the settings.
Feature | Key |
---|---|
Freecam | Insert |
Move the camera forward/left/right/backward | W /A /S /D - UpArrow /LeftArrow /RightArrow /DownArrow |
Move the camera upwards | Space |
Move the camera downwards | LeftControl |
Speed up movement | LeftShift |
Speed down movement | LeftAlt |
Change freecam orientation | Right mouse click |
Tilt left | Numpad 1 |
Tilt right | Numpad 3 |
Reset tilt | Numpad 2 |
Increase FOV | Numpad + |
Decrease FOV | Numpad - |
Reset FOV | Numpad * |
Pause | PageUp |
Block Freecam movement and rotation | Home |
Block games input | Numpad . |
Frameskip | PageDown |
HUD Toggle | Delete |
Freeze NPC animations | Numpad 0 |
The following are the features I developed for this fork. All focused on making things easier for capture artists to get marketing material for studios.
If you found a bug or a problem (or want to see the things I want to work on) head over to the issues page.
The original Unity Explorer had a Freecam feature, but even if it was useful at the time it had a lot of quirks that could be ironed out, so I did. The following are the changes and improvements I made over the original UnityExplorer freecam:
You can click on the "Follow object" button on the panel and select the object you want the camera to follow or click on the "Follow object" button in the inspector screen for more granularity. This can be used as it is, but it's even more useful when playing with camera paths, as you can create a path for the camera to walk relative to the object
By default the camera only follows the object's position, but you can also make it follow its rotation as if the camera was physically bound to the object by checking the "Follow Object Rotation" toggle. Should be useful for mimicking a car camera, a character POV, or creating motion blur.
Added game input block for Unity's legacy system. You can now block (or unblock) the game's input when using the freecam, as long as the game is using the Unity Legacy Input system. If the game uses a custom solution or the latest Unity system then this won't work. Implementing this for Unity's new system is in the backlog, so if you find a game using it (should say "Initialized new InputSystem support." on the logs) then please let me know so I can implement it using that game!
It allows you to spawn spotlights and pointlights, as well as toggle the game's original lights to allow you to relight the scene however you want (a task that is pretty common for screenshots and lighting artists). Please note that this only turns off scene lights and won't turn off ambient light or lights created by emissive materials, effects, or shaders.
You can edit the light parameters by clicking on the "Config" button. There might be a ton of stuff there, but you would want to focus on these properties:
useColorTemperature
property.If you want to move an already created light you can use the "Move to Camera" option after positioning the camera. But if you need to fine-tune its position or orientation you can do so by clicking on the "Config" button, "Inspect Game Object", and editing the position and rotation from there.
There also is a default intensity input field on the panel. Since the intensity varies a lot from game to game you have to increase/decrease this property on a light until it looks right, and once you figure out a value that works for your game you can write it as the default intensity and don't have to edit it on the new lights you spawn from that point.
You can also draw an arrow or sphere representing the light source from spotlights and point lights respectively, to understand your light setups better. To do so click on the "Toggle visualizer" button on a light in the panel.
It allows you to create nodes to build camera paths for videos and cinematics. Features include:
As a side note, the mod UI will be disabled once the path starts, to ease video recording.
Similarly to the Light Manager, you can visualize a camera path with arrows, whose origin and orientation represent the position and orientation that the camera will have at that point in the curve. You can turn this on by clicking on the "Visualize path" checkbox. Keep in mind that this will be turned off once the path starts playing since its purpose is to help the user set up the path itself.
It loads all the current vanilla post-processing effects being used and offers togglers to disable them. It also lets you inspect the postprocessing objects yourself if you want to edit their parameters instead.
Shader toggler would still be preferred (especially as it will be able to catch custom effects that this mod can't), but it might still be useful for some.
Allows you to manually play characters and NPC animations in a scene. This should be pretty useful for getting the right animation on each enemy to set up marketing screenshots.
Favorite animations so they appear first on the dropdown list by clicking on the star button with the animation selected.
The Animator Panel also allows you to freeze all characters in a scene all at once, alongside giving you control over which characters should ignore the master toggler. Each animator also comes with a toggle to be able to hide a character meshes from a scene.
Alongside all of this, you can also open each character game object by clicking on their names, so you can move, rotate, scale them around, disable them, or further edit their properties and child objects.
For each animator, you can also spawn a Bones Panel. This panel will list all of the character's bones and meshes, and provide easy-to-access toggles to disable them and sliders to move them around, allowing you to pose a character to your liking.
BepInEx\plugins\CinematicUnityExplorer\Screenshots
by default, in png format.The mod also supports IGCSConnector, and therefore IGCSDOF, the best modded DOF available. This is an accumulated DOF solution similar to Forza Horizon's or other offline rendering software. This accumulated solution brings some advantages compared to real-time solutions, such as:
Before and after showing the advantages of accumulated DOFs over real-time DOFs.
You can download it, read how to install it, and how to use it here.
[!IMPORTANT] To be able to use IGCSDOF, besides following the instructions above, make sure to download UnityIGCSConnector.dll and put it in the same folder as the games .exe. This is a necessary middleware so the Reshade add-on can communicate with the mod.
[!IMPORTANT] Be sure to select
Classic (slower)
mode instead ofFast
, as the latter one seems to render the image out of focus. HoweverFast
might still work in some games.
Huge shout out to etra0 for implementing this!
It wasn't the original intention to develop this fork to its current state. I just wanted to make it easier for me and my friends to take screenshots of Unity games and it rolled from there. It is in fact true that me modifying an already existing generic mod streamlined things instead of doing everything from zero, but it's also true that some of UnityExplorer vanilla functionality is useful for doing marketing-related stuff as well (as well as allowing some features to work by letting the user get their hands dirty, e.g. unlocking the gameplay freecam).
Maybe I would make a separate version one day, but for now, it is what it is.
The following are features from the original UnityExplorer project which I have not made myself.
If you want to inspect an object or Type from outside the C# console, use the InspectorManager
class:
To inspect an object:
UnityExplorer.InspectorManager.Inspect(theObject);
To inspect a Type:
UnityExplorer.InspectorManager.Inspect(typeof(SomeClass));
UnityEngine.Object
, with optional filtersThe inspector is used to see detailed information on objects of any type and manipulate their values, as well as to inspect C# Classes with static reflection.
[G]
) is used to inspect a GameObject
, and to see and manipulate its Transform and Components.
[R]
and [S]
) are used for everything else
▼
button to expand certain values such as strings, enums, lists, dictionaries, some structs, etcTexture2D
, Image
, Sprite
and Material
objects, there is a View Texture
button at the top of the inspector which lets you view the Texture(s) and save them as a PNG file. AudioClip
objects there is a Show Player
button which opens an audio player widget. For clips which are loaded as DecompressOnLoad
, there is also a button to save them to a .wav
file. Mono.CSharp.Evaluator
to define temporary classes or run immediate REPL code.startup.cs
and placing it in the CinematicUnityExplorer\Scripts\
folder (this folder will be created where you placed the DLL file).Prefix
(which can return bool
or void
), Postfix
, Finalizer
(which can return Exception
or void
), and Transpiler
(which must return IEnumerable<HarmonyLib.CodeInstruction>
). You can define multiple patches if you wish.null
)
Copy(obj)
and Paste()
for accessing the ClipboardBepInEx\config\com.originalnicodr.cinematicunityexplorer.cfg
UserData\MelonPreferences.cfg
{DLL_location}\CinematicUnityExplorer\config.cfg
build.ps1
powershell script to build CinematicUnityExplorer. Releases are found in the Release
folder.Building individual configurations from your IDE is fine, though note that the intial build process builds into Release/<version>/...
instead of the subfolders that the powershell script uses. Batch building is not currently supported with the project.
A non-exhaustive list of games that have used this project for making marketing material:
Did you use this mod for your project? Hit me up and let me know! I would love to check it out!
Even tho it's not necessary, if you happen to use this mod in the marketing campaign of a commercial project and find it useful please consider including it in the credits!
Mono.CSharp
reference for the C# Console.If you have found this project fun or useful in any capacity please consider supporting me on Ko-fi. And please also consider donating to the people in the acknowledgments above! As well as the mod loader maintainers.
Also, if you happen to use this on a commercial project, please let me know! Would love to see what this project helped create!
CinematicUnityExplorer is in no way associated with Unity Technologies. "Unity", Unity logos, and other Unity trademarks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Unity Technologies or its affiliates in the U.S. and elsewhere.