Unity Editor Custom Skins!

Few weeks ago I started a thread In Unity forums, it is worth to check it as it contain some ugly images for a freak skinned Unity version that have a green UI and different buttons/animations for the Editor itself.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/editor-custom-skins.278068/

In the past few months I decided to use neither the dark or light themes with Unity3d, and I must have a new color, at the end of the day a part of being human involves that refusing to be forced for limited choices, although I love the two skins, but I found I must find a way.

As an old user of Unity, I started quickly running the same process of any Unity related issue, which involves the documentations, the forums, the answer hub and finally Google. Unfortunately I found that nothing figured out a way to do that. So I decided to think outside the box. First I started to almost treat the engine as a game, and use some of the available tools to debug and track the GPU/CPU calls. I ended up with one conclusion, that is the Unity Engine, is a one big Unity game. and that conclusion made me see what I was never been able to see before. I don’t want to share more about the process, as I’m not sure if Unity would love that people starts making Pink skins! But all what I wanted to mentions, that anything you might think is impossible or limited is not exist, as your brain is the limited party here!

With that said, and with the past conclusion, I said to my self “The best way to fix, change or update Unity game is by using the Unity Editor”, and finally I started another round of debugging and testing, and ended up with writing a set of tools that allows me to change in the skin itself, using the Unity Editor itself!

Finally, I found it is not worth the time to be waste, it was a nice try to hack the engine, and open it’s hood. It was epic in fact to see those tons and tons of assets, but changing the skin color is not just setting a single color value that will be applied to all the UI elements, but it is a process of changing the colors of hundreds of small assets.

Some of the Editor Assets – Click to Open the large version of it

This method opened lots of closed doors in front of me. Now I set my Unity back to the dark skin, but I managed to change other things. As I used to use lots and lots of Planes in my games, but Unity always use it’s own multi faces plane mesh, Now with an access to almost all the assets used to build the editor, I managed to replace the default plane with a 2 triangles one I exported from Maya. And now whenever I insert a plane, it use the Maya one by default. Still there is lots to be made, but it is a matter of balancing time waste with importance.

Glad to reach this point, but I never liked my green version of Unity 🙂

**Update 

As lots of people sent me asking for hints regarding this process (mail, discuss, forum messages,…..); I would like to post those hints here for further inquiries, but I’ll not share any of the tools I wrote to hack the file:

*All the matter related to a file called “unity editor resources” inside the unity installation.
it is a *.assets file, which can be hacked using the editor itself. Then adding files to it requires writing a some tools.

I hope it helps, And please feel free to contact me regarding anything Except the tools to access the file content.

Cheers,
-m