Topic: Unity 4 Videos

[silicone_milk]

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 

[ratty redemption]

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.

[silicone_milk]

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.

[ratty redemption]

cool, and good luck.

[ratty redemption]

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.

[silicone_milk]

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. 

[ratty redemption]

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.

[silicone_milk]

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.

[ratty redemption]

that might well be the case with the ads, but i use adblock in chrome so i don't see or hear any.

[kat]

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.

[silicone_milk]

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.

[ratty redemption]

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?

[silicone_milk]

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.

[ratty redemption]

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?

[silicone_milk]

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.