Mapbox Unity

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Build a Unity 3D Game with the Mapbox SDK for Unity: PocketDroids GO Bring location-based experiences to life by adding real-time locations and mapping into a Unity 3D game. Introduction to PocketDroids GO and the Mabox SDK for Unity. Download Maps SDK for Unity Mapbox: View documentation: http://. Applications built with the Mapbox Maps SDK for Unity are billed based on monthly active users. The line item shown in your invoice will vary based on the version of the Maps SDK for Unity you are using. Below is a breakdown of what you can expect to see on your invoice: Versions 2.1.0 and higher. To add new POIs from user input in Unity, here is a basic outline of what you'll need to do: Create a dataset in Mapbox (and, optionally, see below, a tileset) In Unity, perform a hit test to determine where the user has clicked. Use the AbstractMap GameObject to translate Unity coordinates to geographical coordinates.

  1. Mapbox Unity Error
  2. Mapbox Unity Sdk
  3. Mapbox Unity
  4. Mapbox Unity Offline
  5. Mapbox Unity Tutorial
  6. Mapbox Unity Style

This tutorial will walk you through how to create a visualization of 3D buildings on top of a 3D terrain map for use in a Unity application. You will:

  • Set up a Mapbox project in Unity.
  • Learn about the Mapbox-specific terminology, tools, and services you’ll use to build your visualization.
  • Add a map to your scene.
  • Customize your map for your specific needs.
  • Learn how to add buildings and other vector data.

This tutorial is for versions 1.4.0 and beyond. If you are using version 1.3.0 or earlier, read the mesh generation tutorials instead.

Getting started

Before getting started, you’ll need to:

  1. Install the Mapbox Maps SDK for Unity. For full installation instructions, visit https://www.mapbox.com/unity-sdk.
  2. Create an empty Unity project.
  3. Configure your Mapbox access token in your Unity project. For token configuration instructions, visit http://www.mapbox.com/unity-sdk/#token.

Set up your project

Your new, empty scene will need a Map object to display a map. We provide a Map prefab already that you can drag and drop into your scene.

This Map object comes with an Abstract Map script, where you can adjust map settings like location, map style, elevation, and more.

To see what the default Map looks like, hit Play.

You have a map! Note that you may need to change the camera’s position to see the map properly in the Game panel, but you can see it in the Scene panel.

Customize your map

Now you’ll learn how to style two kinds of maps: one with rich satellite imagery and elevation data, and one with vector data to show buildings. You will learn how to use various settings in Abstract Map to change a map’s location, map style, elevation, and vector layers.

Create a map of Mt. Hood, Oregon

Select your Map object and look at the Inspector window. Under the Abstract Map general settings, either change the location to 45.374218, -121.688341 or search “Mt Hood”. Set the zoom level to 13. Open the “Others” settings and toggle Snap Map to Zero.

Now open the image settings and change the Data Source to “Mapbox Satellite”. Finally, open the terrain settings and change the Elevation Layer Type to “Terrain with Elevation”.

Save your scene and hit play. Switch to your Scene panel and you’ll see something like this:

Mapbox Unity Error

Now you'll make a map of downtown Manhattan!

Create a map of downtown Manhattan

To make this map of Manhattan, you can either start over in a new scene, or change the settings in your existing scene. It’s up to you!

First set the location to 40.706843, -74.011370 or search “New York Stock Exchange”, and set the zoom level to 17. Next, go to the image settings and change the Data Source to “Mapbox Dark”. In the terrain settings, change the Elevation Layer Type to “Flat Terrain”.

Now open up the vector settings. Change the Data Source to “Mapbox Streets”. Create a new visualizer by clicking the “Add Visualizer” button. It will now show up in the vector layer visualizers list as “Untitled”. Click it and hit the Enter key to rename it to “Buildings”.

Click your “Buildings” visualizer and find the Extrusion Type setting. Change it to “Property Height”. Next, look for the Material Options setting. Next to Roof Material and Wall Material is a small circular icon. Click it, and select ”BuildingMaterial” for both.

Hit play to see Manhattan with buildings!

Next steps

To learn more about what you can do with Mapbox Maps SDK for Unity, read the SDK documentation.

If you’ve ever wanted to add real world maps to your Unity game or application, you’re in luck. This week, I tried out the Mapbox Unity plugin and have to report that it’s extremely easy to use and pretty powerful. If you want to get real world maps like PokemonGO, or even generate a voxel world from real terrain, mapbox makes it quick and painless to accomplish. These Unity3D maps can be generated dynamically at runtime or if you have a specific location you can pre-build them and include them with your app or game.

Getting the Unity3d maps SDK (MapBox)

You can download the mapbox Unity SDK here: https://www.mapbox.com/unity/
It comes as an .assetpackage file that you import into your project.

Account Setup

Before you can use mapbox in your application, you need an account and an API key.
Create an account on the mapbox site.

Visit your API Tokens page and copy your api token: https://www.mapbox.com/studio/account/tokens/

Open the Mapboxwindow.

Enter your Access Token

If it’s valid, you should see the “TokenValid” notification in the window.

Examples

The first thing I’d recommend you try is load up the various example scenes that come with the package.
These examples show a good sampling of the things you can do with the mapbox plugin.

Start with the Slippy demo, it’s likely the most applicable for your projects.
It shows how to select an area and start scrolling along, loading in new tiles as they’re needed (much like you’d do if you were tracking a persons real world position).

The mesh here is 3d, you can also run on it, fly over it, or anything else you’d do with a 3d terrain

You can adjust the starting location and zoom range with the MapController gameobject in the scene.

Mapbox Unity

What kind of maps can I have?

If you take another look at the MapController, you’ll see there’s a Map Visualization field.

The Map visualization controls exactly what it says, the visuals of your map. You can customize it or build your own from scratch (I’d recommend customizing a few first).

They’ve also bundled a variety of visualizations into the plugin, if you search and replace (or try out other demo scenes), you can see how some of these look.

For example, here I’ve swapped in the PoiDemoVisualization and moved our starting point to London

Voxel Maps

Or.. maybe you want a minecraft style voxel representation of your area..

The VoxelWorld scene shows exactly how to set this up.

Pre-building a map

One thing I needed to do and you may as well is pre-generate a map for a specific area.

If your application or game only needs a certain geographic area, maybe a map of some specific city, or a big landmark like the pyramids.. you can build it and bundle it in with very little work.

The MapController class that ships with the plugin is meant to be a demo/starting point, but with a little extension you can change it to be an editor time generator instead of runtime.

The quick and dirty way to do this is just edit the MapController class and move the map generation / initialization to a context menu.

Change this..

To this..

And you’ll have a context menu like this that you can use before pressing play.

It’s important to note that if you do this, you WILLbreak the demos. So if you’re even a little comfortable with c#, you’re probably better off copying the MapController class and making your own modified version of it. Or if you’re very comfortable with c#, dig in and build something awesome.

Range

The last thing I want to cover is the Range field. This tells Mapbox how many tiles away from the Lat/Lng you want to generate in each direction (N, E, S, W). It defaults to 0, but you can adjust it to the values that feel right for your specific application.

Performance Notes

While I was trying out this plugin, I wanted to know how it would fare for performance. With some of the demos I quickly realized there was a big variance on the vertex count depending on some options.

The biggest performance hit I came across was with generating roads. With roads on, in a smaller metropolitan area, my vertex count went from around 500,000 to 20,000,000.
This could be a bug, or it could be me using the SDK wrong, I’m not sure (though I’m going to ask the developers). But if you need to keep your counts down, I’d recommend disabling road generation in your visualiaztion settings (or using one of the predefined ones that doesn’t generate road meshes).

Mapbox Unity Sdk

Pricing

I haven’t had a need to pay for Mapbox yet because my usage is pretty small. The free plan covers up to 50,000 users a month on mobile, and after that the price jumps up quick to $499/mo.

Mapbox Unity

But if you have more than 50k users a month in your app or game and collect any revenue at all, the cost should be nominal.

Mapbox Unity Offline

The big limit on the free version seems more than generous and is probably the tier most people are in.

if you pre-generate the maps, you’re never calling the sdk and wouldn’t hit this either, but again that’s only valid for uses where you don’t need the whole world, just a tiny area.

Mapbox Unity Tutorial

Conclusions

Mapbox Unity Style

I really love this Mapbox SDK and the fact that it’s free to use for most projects. It’s easy to get setup with and customize to your hearts desire. I plan to keep using it going forward and dig in deeper to discover all the power inside.