Unity, where to start?
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Hey guys, over the Christmas break I was going to build a little test level and put it into Unity. My goal is to have models, textures, and real time lighting. Ideally I could get a follow camera tuned and have a character moving around the world. Doesn't necessarily have to animate though.
I don't know anything about Unity, can anyone recommend a starting point, tutorials, forums, what to read first?
I don't know anything about Unity, can anyone recommend a starting point, tutorials, forums, what to read first?
Replies
what you want to accomplish could easily be achieved in a day or so with any moderate understanding of any 3d suite
bottom line is, unity is SIMPLE. drag and drop and you're good to go, accepts pretty much any file format for textures, models, sound ect...
edit:
feel free to pm me if you have any specific questions, i use unity on a daily basis for work
If you want to import a model a model fully textured you need to drag it into the unity project window with its texture from finder(on mac) or a window(on windows).
Then you need to set your model up in the project folder, make sure the normals/phong is showing as you expect, if it isnt then set normals to calculate and set a value yourself and hit apply.
If you want the object to be lightmapped or use physics on the mesh remember to hit generate lightmap uvs checkbox and generate colliders checkbox.
then drag your model from the project folder into the hierarchy to put it into the game world and check what shader its using.
Thats pretty much all I do most of the time, from there you can import the standard unity first person controller and run around your model if you like.
Find your meshes and textures folders, and put stuff there. It makes everything a billion times easier and faster, and less likely to be stabbed.
Unity has default first and third person controllers. They come with colliders, cameras, etc. things like walk speed, camera angle, camera height, camera smoothing, etc can be changed in the Inspector (go to window - layout - Tall or Wide, make sure you have inspector and heirachy at all times).
From then on, just get some environment going, get some colliders, and make sure your normals are OK. If you're feeling lucky, try UnitySteer 2.2 for some AI. It's kinda thick sometimes, but it's good enough for test purposes.
Anything you want Unity to lightmap must be marked as static. In the inspector of the object (needs to be in the current scene), there's the option at the top right. For this step, make as many lights as you want, and lightmapping (even in Indie) DOES do shadows. So make sure each light has shadows enabled if you want it. Find Render Settings (under a project drop-down menu) you'll find global illumination and fog. Then select anything you want baked, and hit bake selected (don't always need to bake everything if you're testing a bake). Beast is pretty fast and good.
For colliders and stuff you don't want visible, but not invisible all the time, put them on a new layer called 'Colliders'. Then go to the main camera, and uncheck the layer 'Colliders'. Saves you losing stuff in the scene.
UnityTree can be good too if you want to make trees. It's kinda clumsy compared to Speedtree, but faster than most other ways, and surprisingly good.
On the Unity Asset Store, grab anything free that takes your fancy. I'd recommend hard surface shaders free, for example.
Then once you've got your stuff, publish to web (Unity Web player, usually you need the plug-in, but there's an option to wrap it in magic and code and other wizardry, I dunno). Then post it here.