PrimerTools | Tool used for producing Primer YouTube videos

There isn't real documentation yet, but here's an overview of the most fundamental pieces to hopefully get you going. The PrimerObject class inherits from Unity's base class for game object scripts, MonoBehaviour, and adds methods for animating parameters with easing. PrimerObject is the parent class of more specific classes like PrimerArrow, and it's what you should use as a parent class for any custom script you make for Unity game object you want to animate with this tool. For any game object you put into Unity, you can attach a PrimerObject component, which will let you call methods like MoveTo or ScaleUpFromZero. Classes that inherit from PrimerObject can also animate their C# properties (not fields) using AnimateValue. The Director class sets up the scene camera and lighting and defines some methods for setting up animation timings. To script a scene, you can make a script defining a subclass of Director that sets timings for SceneBlocks. Directors are usually going to have game objects and their components stored as variables, then manipulate and/or call those objects' methods in different parts of the scene. For example, the Unity scene "SimpleDirectedScene" has a game object named "Director" with a SimpleSceneDirector component attached to it. SimpleSceneDirector inherits from Director and defines the specific animations for the scene. Unity is a game engine. It operates on a loop that processes one frame at a time. In a game, the framerate is often flexible based on the amount of processing that needs to go into each frame. The engine keeps the "game time" in sync with real time, letting the rate of frames vary. The "Normal" director mode acts this way. In video formats, though, "game time" between frames needs to be constant, or else the speed of our eventual video will be warped. We keep the frame rate constant by setting Time.captureFramerate, which happens in "Constant Frame Rate" director mode. With this set to 60, for example, each frame loop of the game engine will move game time forward by 1/60 of a second, regardless of how much time went by in the real world while the frame was processing. This effectively slows game time down so the frames can stay in sync (or, it can even speed up the game if you have a beefy machine and a simple scene). This turns out to be pretty important when saving frames with the recorder, since at high resolutions, it can easily take close to if not more than 1/60 seconds just to save the image. It also makes it so your code can produce smooth videos even if it's slow. When you eventually make a video from your frames, your video editor of choice should be able to import an image sequence. If you need other formats, you can use Unity's official recorder asset (...or add the feature to this tool). It doesn't let you start and stop recordings (or anything else) via code, though. This tool makes extensive (excessive?) use of coroutines. The frame loop usually waits for all methods to finish before rendering the frame and moving to the next iteration in the loop. If you write a method to animate the motion of an object, it will appear to just teleport to its final destination, since all the code is executed between frames, in an instant of game time. Coroutines are different. They use yield statements to pause execution until the next iteration of the frame loop, letting you write a method that executes as game time passes. The most basic yield statement is yield return null;, which is the same as saying "stop executing here, let the frame update, and then continue on". The methods in PrimerObject mainly puts yield return null statements inside while loops that are set to run for a certain duration in game time. There are other kinds of yield statements. yield return new WaitForSeconds(x); will wait x (a float value) seconds of game time before continuing the coroutine. The Director class defines a custom yield statement yield return new WaitUntilSceneTime(x) that waits until the specified scene time (managed by the director, but usually the same as game time) in seconds. You can also yield based on the completion of another coroutine. CoinFlipScene has an example of this.