hi. i’m a noob to unity, and iv never done any kind of programing before. the closest thing to programing iv ever done was Scratch MIT. i have a few questions.
1). how do i even begin to start? with the object, the programing, or what?
2). how do i create a player character and make him/her customize?
3). how do i make the camera follow the player?
4). unity doesn’t want me making an app game because i use windows. is there any way around this?
5). how do i make materiel and how would i make it glow?
6). what would the most recommended modeling program be? (must be free and dummy friendly)
Start with a design. Make sure you know exactly what you want to do before you start doing it- that way, you won’t waste time doing things you didn’t really want to, and also things become much more straightforward to implement if you have already thought them through, and know what it is that you want to achieve. It’s basically because of this that I find I do my best programming on the train, with a pencil and paper!
If by ‘create a player character’ you mean ‘make a model and animate it’, then I’m afraid there’s really no easy way, other than finding a good free rig on the internet somewhere, or making your character some kind of rigid object (like a jet or spaceship in a top-down shooter). Getting animations to look right is really hard, but like anything you can learn it through lots of practice. As for the ‘customize’ bit, that really depends on what you mean. If you are talking about detail modifications by the designer (you), then that just comes under modelling and animation. If you are talking about player customization, then that is a whole other kettle of fish, and deserves a separate question (seeing as it is really pretty complex). Have a look around this site- it’s a question that has been asked several times in the past, so there should be some decent information out there if you care to look.
Player following cams are one of the most common types. The simplest way is to just make the camera object a ‘child’ of the player’s transform- this way the camera will always stay at the exact distance and height from the player. Of course, this is hardly ideal if you want a camera which can be moved- however, there are several mouselook scripts of varying qualities and abilities around here, the Unify wiki, and, in fact, the inbuilt Standard Assets!
I can’t really speak for this situation (since I don’t develop on windows very often), but I’ve never had trouble making .exe builds from MacOS, and I wasn’t aware that there was any problem building .app executables from windows! Unless you are talking about iPhone builds, which is a different problem entirely.
Making materials is as easy as selecting Create->Material from the assets window- from there you can choose one of the inbuilt shaders- including several ‘self-illum’ shaders, which can be textured with a nice ‘glow map’.
Blender! It is a free and open source fully functional 3d modelling package. While it’s not exactly ‘dummy friendly’ (I have yet to see a 3d modelling tool which is what I would call ‘dummy friendly’), there is a huge community of people out there at least some of whom should be willing to help you get past the first slopes of the learning curve.
In any case- good luck, and welcome to UnityAnswers!
1 and 3 - A good starting point is the First Person Tutorial: download the file FPS_Tutorial.zip and the 3 PDF files, then follow the instructions step by step - you’ll learn a lot in a few days. When ready download FPS_Tutorial_Complete.zip - is the same project, but fine tuned by professionals. There also exists a 3rd Person Tutorial which can teach you a lot of other tricks.
2 and 5 - Customizing characters and making special materials/shaders are complicated things that will take a reasonable amount of time to learn - don’t worry to much about them right now.
4 - You need an Apple computer to completely create Apple games, but you can develop most of your game in a PC and only do the fine tuning in an Apple machine.
6 - Many guys here use Blender - it’s free, and I suspect that for simple modelling it’s as friendly as 3DSMax (despite to my dummy eyes all modelling programs seem hostile!).