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Game Editing => General Content Creation => Topic started by: silicone_milk on April 08, 2013, 11:37:11 PM

Title: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: silicone_milk on April 08, 2013, 11:37:11 PM
I've started working on a series of videos for Unity 4 covering the creation of a 2D isometric RPG.

I have it organized in a way where each video covers a specific stage like setting up the camera, creating materials/textures, using prefabs, creating models with blender and bringing them into Unity, etc...

It's been nagging at me for the past couple of days that I might tend to ramble on and talk a bit slow instead of just being concise.

If anybody has the time, I would appreciate getting some feedback on the videos. Did I not go into enough detail with some pieces? Did I spend too much time talking about something else?

You can find the videos here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-JpP-FdwBjlkEtD91GtL8W4l-TEakHM7&feature=view_all

Thanks for your time guys, I really appreciate it  :)
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: ratty redemption on April 08, 2013, 11:59:01 PM
hi milk, i've recently been thinking about researching into unity, so will gladly check out your videos later on today, and give you any feedback on the presentation that i think of.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: silicone_milk on April 09, 2013, 12:57:09 AM
Thanks Ratty :)

I just got started looking into Unity as well. I touched on it back in its first iteration and wasn't super impressed at first. I came back to it recently while looking for solutions to quickly prototype a game while also being able to launch for mobile devices, browser, and PC.

I considered writing my own engine in MonoGame but it depends on how Unity works out for me. So far prototyping has been a breeze.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: ratty redemption on April 09, 2013, 01:14:48 AM
cool, and good luck.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: ratty redemption on April 09, 2013, 03:57:33 AM
milk, i've just watched the first 3 videos. and although i agree that you do talk quite slowly, i found them easy to follow.

my only real criticism is when you switched to the game mode (or whatever it's called?) the scale of the objects on screen was tiny, similar to when you were working in photoshop. so although i could follow what you were doing by your commentary, i couldn't easily see, plus there was a lot of wasted screen space in the tutorials as a result of the focal area being so small. not so bad when you were in unity's edit mode.

i hope my feedback isn't discouraging at all? i have just subscribed to your youtube channel, so i definitely think they are worth watching, and i look forward to seeing the workflow from blender to unity.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: silicone_milk on April 09, 2013, 04:18:34 AM
Awesome.

That's an interesting point. I didn't realize the editor view was tiny in the game view mode on Unity. I'll see what I can do about that in the next video.

It's not discouraging at all. Thanks for subscribing and for the feedback.  :)
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: ratty redemption on April 09, 2013, 04:48:18 AM
cool, you're welcome.

one other minor thing, i noticed your volume was quite low. when watching yt videos, i tend to have my master volume between 1/4 and 1/2, and with yours i needed to set it to 3/4.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: silicone_milk on April 09, 2013, 06:22:02 AM
That's interesting. On my end my video volume matches the volume on the ads that youtube displays.

I think I recall having this issue in an old call of duty editing video I made a few years back.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: ratty redemption on April 09, 2013, 06:49:27 AM
that might well be the case with the ads, but i use adblock in chrome so i don't see or hear any.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: kat on April 09, 2013, 08:24:44 AM
Ha very cool, I learned stuff watching those ;)

They really have worked hard to get Blender integration implemented which is really good to see.

Echo what Ratty said about volume being on the low side, not a big issue as such but something you might want to look into solving - might just be a setting in the screen recorder you were using or increasing Mic input in your audio control panel (what recorder were you using btw?). As for you speaking slowly, that is a BIG plus IMHO, too many people just ramble on and at a speed the means having to stop and start constantly to follow what's going on.

Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: silicone_milk on April 09, 2013, 09:28:31 PM
lol I'm glad to hear it, Kat.

I don't remember the name of the recorder off the top of my head. It's some Java program that was free and does a hell of a job. It records straight to wmv format which I bring into an editor to clip out periods where I flubbed while speaking and upload straight to youtube.

They really did make Blender integration a breeze. You could build your entire world with Blender and drop it right into Unity. I'm very impressed with it.

I didn't think about the slow speaking in that way. That's a good point.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: ratty redemption on April 09, 2013, 11:22:18 PM
milk, i've just watched your 4th video, where you describe importing blender models. that is so cool that unity can import straight from a .blend file, if i understood that correctly?

and does it automatically create a collision hull? do you know if we can assign our own collision hulls, so to simplify the physics on a complex or detailed model?
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: silicone_milk on April 10, 2013, 10:10:04 PM
Yep, you just save your .blend file somewhere in your Assets folder for your Unity project and Unity will automagically bring it into the game. It's very cool stuff. I think somebody mentioned that behind the scenes it's actually using the .dae import/export to convert .blend to a Unity-friendly format.

Collision hulls are not automatically generated. However, you can easily add a physics component which uses mesh collision. The component will automatically use the mesh it's attached to essentially turning the meshes that make up your model into a collision hull. You can customize that with simpler meshes if you have crazy geometry too. I think I'll make a video covering collision hulls real quick since that's actually an important question.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: ratty redemption on April 10, 2013, 11:37:59 PM
cool and i'll look forward to watching that.

another question, is there an option in the unity editor window to hide the icons for lights and camera?
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: silicone_milk on April 11, 2013, 05:57:18 AM
Collision mesh video is up.

I don't know of any way to disable the icons for the camera/lights. I tried playing around in the preferences but didn't see anything that jumped out.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: ratty redemption on April 11, 2013, 06:16:48 AM
thanks for looking milk, and cool, i'm downloading the video tutorial now.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: ratty redemption on April 12, 2013, 12:37:46 AM
milk, that was fascinating. and your collision mesh, you built in blender for the bridge, was exactly how i was thinking i would build one for that model.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: silicone_milk on April 12, 2013, 08:42:41 AM
I'm glad you enjoyed the video, Ratty. I literally just threw that collision mesh together off the top of my head. I'd probably really end up using 2 planes angled to be ramps meeting at the center to get rid of the sides that my objects would never hit though.

I played with animations today. I had work to do at a house being remodeled though so didn't get around to recording a video yet. However, animations in Unity (especially Unity 4) is mind blowing. I'll have a video about it tomorrow.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: silicone_milk on April 13, 2013, 03:41:47 AM
I think I fixed my mic volume with the latest video. Messed with my soundcard settings.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: ratty redemption on April 13, 2013, 04:29:35 AM
i'm downloading the latest video now, looking forward to it.

and that's very cool if collision meshes can be open meshes and or simple planes?
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: ratty redemption on April 13, 2013, 07:16:33 AM
wow, that animated object was so cool, especially with the physics.

and your audio was better. but the unity and blender text was blurry, even in 720p, which i don't remember it being so with your other videos, did you capture at a lower res?
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: silicone_milk on April 13, 2013, 09:54:27 AM
Glad to hear it.

I'm noticing that now that I look at the video on youtube. I hadn't changed any settings and uploaded it at 720p as I normally do. Very strange. I read that it can take youtube a while to generate all the sizes and that it could be a first pass encoding.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: kat on April 13, 2013, 11:53:47 AM
Just watched 5 and 6. Simple and approachable info. Looking forward to the remaining vids.

[EDIT]I've just installed a new YouTube AddOn. We should be able to include vids directly now so you might want to give that a try silicone (just embed the normal YT URL e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqIMbWKeXCA between the BBCode tags).
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: silicone_milk on April 13, 2013, 10:33:59 PM
The latest video being blurry at 720p is really bothering me. It's still that way and it's been several hours. I can't think of anything different that I've done between that and the collision mesh video other than.... I think I installed my new AMD video card in between the video before last and the latest. I was using an nvidia card prior to that.

I'll check out the BBCode tag thing, Kat. That sounds cool.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: ratty redemption on April 14, 2013, 01:26:45 AM
@kat, that's forum add on sounds cool. is there anything like that for the deviantart player?

@milk, it will be interesting to see what your next video's quality will be like. and it's probably just yt screwing up their encoding. i've occasionally seen people complain on let's plays, where some viewers in certain countries see a degraded version of 720p, while others see a high quality, possibly due to yt's regional servers ending up with different versions?
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: silicone_milk on April 16, 2013, 12:25:24 AM
animation video is taking a while to make. Had to make a character and rig her up. Finishing painting some weights and I'm going to see how she deforms before doing some basic animation clips like Idle, Walk, Run, Jump.

Here's a solid/wireframe of the character from yesterday's work. ~790 tris total so far still need to model and rig hair. I'll probably be sitting at around 850-900 tris once she's finished. Yes, I realize the edges sit at a weird spot on her face cutting through her eyes.....I have plans to fix that later but ingame it's not an issue since the camera isn't close enough to see it.

(https://www.katsbits.com/community/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fpuu.sh%2F2ASgb&hash=4b15d41fe980fa7042156dc70f6b2d955bb0384d)

I originally wanted her to have a scarf (I might still make a version with a scarf) to have something interesting to animate behind her as she runs around and jumps/rolls. I settled on long hair (pigtails or a ponytail) for now.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: ratty redemption on April 16, 2013, 02:27:54 AM
cool, and i'm looking forward to seeing you get this model working in unity. am i correct in thinking unity has some built in animations for human rigs? i watched a couple of video tutorials yesterday but wasn't sure if they were 3rd party plugins.

and can we animate with bones any part of a model? do the bones get affected by gravity or would we fake that?
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: kat on April 16, 2013, 02:59:40 AM
Be mindful not to make her too poly heavy - based on the camera's distance and angle you might be able to get away with fewer, although it looks good so far for the purposes of the vids. *up*
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: ratty redemption on April 16, 2013, 03:04:03 AM
what are the poly limits like with unity?
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: silicone_milk on April 16, 2013, 03:08:48 AM
Ratty - From what I'm seeing with Unity's Mecanim system, you make animation clips in your modeling program of choice (Blender in this case) and Mecanim provides a state machine to blend animations together and create 'in-between' animations like running left/right, etc...

That's an excellent question on gravity. I will have to see.

As for poly limits, I'm nowhere near hitting anything unacceptable. I just really like lower-poly models. They give more of a 'game' feel in my opinion.

Kat - I haven't been stressing too much on detail because of the fact the character will be far from the camera, however, in the future, I'll be doing a very similar game with a perspective camera which will be able to zoom in up close on the model. Eventually I'll end up modeling eyes and such for eye tracking and whatnot.

Currently the face uses a 128x128 diffuse, the body will probably get a 256x256 since there isn't going to be too much small detail. I might stop living in 1998 and use a 1024x1024 for the body and 512x512 for the face.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: ratty redemption on April 16, 2013, 03:24:57 AM
understood, thanks milk. and he he, i remember well what it's like to work in 256 size textures for games. i actually enjoyed the challenge to see how much detail we could cram into those.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: ratty redemption on April 17, 2013, 12:06:57 PM
i've just had a quick read of the unity "terms of use":

http://unity3d.com/company/legal/terms-of-use

and i'm not sure what to think of this part:
Quote
General Prohibitions

You agree not to do any of the following:

Post, upload, publish, submit or transmit any text, graphics, images, software, music, audio, video, information or other material that: ... (iv) is defamatory, obscene, pornographic, vulgar or offensive; (v) promotes discrimination, bigotry, racism, hatred, harassment or harm against any individual or group; (vi) promotes violence or actions that are threatening to any other person; or (vii) promotes illegal or harmful activities or substances.

doesn't that pretty much cover all mature rated video games? bioshock infinite for example has violence, strong language, racism, bigotry, drug use etc. and rpg's like the witcher series also have nudity and **** scenes. and of course there is the infamous gta games, or the satirical saint's row series with their particular take on the traditional baseball bat.

kat, what is your interpretation of the unity tos?
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: kat on April 17, 2013, 01:57:59 PM
Yeah, it's an interesting one. I think UDK has similar terms which would, if interpreted in a literal sense, prevent most 18+ games - pretty much all combat games based on modern theatres of war could be argued on the ground of xenophobia (intolerance of Arab stereotypes) for example.

I think it's supposed to be interpreted in a similar way to current anti-inflammatory and anti-incitement laws, i.e. you can't/shouldn't be making/distributing games which make deliberate calls to some form of action, violence or other call to cause harm (think 'neo-nationalists', islamophobes, terrorist groups and so forth). And yes, you certainly couldn't make an 18+/M rated 'Adult' game with it (or anything that would allow that type of interaction between users).

Generally speaking these types of terms are aimed at protecting the company from being sued because "such-and-such used their engine so they support that kind of philosophy/action" etc. So yes, on one hand is it a de facto restriction on use, but on the other it protects the company from liabilities.

Back on topic. Being an ISO game, and the level of detail (based on camera distance), going above 256x256 seems redundant as the benefits attributed to larger sizes may not be that noticeable. Might be worth testing for the sake of testing though.

(see here for continuation of ToS discussion (http://www.katsbits.com/smforum/index.php?topic=487.0))
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: silicone_milk on May 10, 2013, 11:40:34 PM
I'm still around. The animation video has been a bit delayed as I've been busy with other things recently. I should have some extra time to record the video soon.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: ratty redemption on May 14, 2013, 03:12:49 PM
cool and i've since been watching as many video tutorials as i can find on unity, and especially the playmaker visual scripting (fsm) plugin, which looks like a very useful toolset for myself and other non coder types.

i am particularly interested in seeing your game coming together since you're walking us through the blender to unity workflow.
Title: Re: Unity 4 Videos
Post by: ratty redemption on June 08, 2013, 12:35:09 AM
this unite 2012 talk on substance materials in unity is amazing, it's similar to crazy bump. although built into the unity editor, and with even more options to tweak than cb.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZS6DDb7OGA