Well, I googled "learn unity" for you and got this for you. The free version of Unity does not cast shadows by default. It may be harder getting a scene looking great. I am glad you are 'completely open to this' because learning a game engine is completely up to you.
Make sure 3D snap active, not 2D or 2.5. Right click it and go to the options tab and check on "Use Axis Center As Start Snap Point". Why they have the default set to off I'll never know... screws everyone up the first time they try to use it.
"Canned animations" refer to a strict default same set of animations used by the game. In JK2/JKA it has alot of human lightsaber attack/defend animations, so there's no point wasting life making your own when you can only used the canned animations anyway.
Here's an image, where are these black splotchies coming from. Default settings don't work for shit I have to turn on the legacy fg mode where you put a min and max range in to get rid of these. I have this on my home computer and my work computer.
Just bought it. Took near an hour to install, now I'm getting this junk: http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/spore-technical-support/335136-spore-can-t-see-my-internet-connection.html :( Edit: I think windows vista's firewall blocks it by default for some reason.. hmm
Connect the heightmap's channel to the alpha of a LERP node. The LERP node sets what number is your highest value(white) and lowest (black) By default it has 1 and 0 so you just plug it to alpha. Then i guess you could multiply the outcome with a constant 1
Sorry, totally miss understood what you were saying. I've just gotten so sick of constantly hearing people talk about how physical media needs to die off that I see it as the default argument most people are trying to make in these sorts of topics :-/
another way to speed up is to set the display mode to #flat so that all the shading is not computed anymore. With big scenes that was usually the biggest boost for me, and yes the back face culling should be set to off which should be by default since max 9 (because of that reason).
So it no longer creates the phong viewport material by default? Did people not like that? Looks like it now just inherits the material assigned to master base mesh. I'm cool with that. Material can also be changed after creating the Hard Mesh object to whatever you like.
But you can see that Zadd is on in the upper picture? I tried all the Draw buttons anyway I solved the grabdoc issue, apparently it's best to draw out a Plane3d to start and set the default depth, otherwise other meshes will be out of range or something The mysterious program that is Zbrush