The Project Panel and Importing - Unity Official Tutorials

The Project Panel is where you store

all of the assets that make up your game.

Anything you create with the panel,

and any asset you import, will be kept here.

You can create Unity-specific assets by clicking the

create button at the top.

Or import assets created in an external application.

You can import by right clicking,

by using the top menu

or simply by adding files to the assets folder in your operating system

or by saving from another application.

The project panel is a mirror of your assets folder.

And when viewing the assets folder in your operating system

you'll notice that meta files are created for

every asset that's placed in to the project.

Note that once the asset is in you should always use

the project panel to move it around or edit it

rather than using your operating system

as this can break lines in the library of your project.

The project panel has two styles of view,

one and two column.

These can be switched by clicking the context menu

button in the top right.

One column view lets you see assets in a simple hierarchy as shown here.

Two column view gives you more flexibility

and more options to work with assets.

You can select, move and duplicate assets in the project.

Create and organise in to folders.

As well as label assets and search for them.

Assets can also be previewed in a thumbnail form

by dragging the slider at the bottom,

with hierarchies then being shown with a right-arrow

that can be used to expand or collapse them.

Assets can also be searched for

and sorted by their name,

their type, a label

or by a favourite grouping.

To create favourites you could perform a search

and then click the star button in the top right

and give your new group a name.

You can even search the assets store from the project browser.

By typing in the standard search field

and switching from assets to asset store.