If anyone is wondering why Unity developers are so loyal to UT and their INCREDIBLE development tools, here is an example for the reason why: Chicken Cannon™
I did this game in less than 24 hours. It’s very playable and hilarious to play and I’m almost done with it. Though I still have a bit left to do, I spent only about 6-8 of those hours working with Unity itself. The rest of the 20-or-so hours was spent creating all the artwork with Cheetah 3D (which I can highly recommend).
This really underscores for me the importance of having the right tools. I’ve only been using Unity since about October, but it is so easy and powerful, I was able to create this game for the iPhone in less than a day! (Including artwork.)
Other than a bit of framework code I re-used from my earlier game (Christmas Spell), I started entirely from scratch.
Cheetah also deserves a mention here. I’ve been working with Cheetah for only about a month (and only a small portion of that month). Before that, the only 3D modeler I’d used was Milkshape, and I only used that a handful of times. I’m not an artist, but Cheetah allowed me to create almost everything (I used Paint Shop Pro for some 2D work) for the game, and I expect I’ll get better at it with time.
I do like Blender’s feature-richness, but Cheetah is so gosh-darn easy to pick up, learn, and use, I can safely say it, along with Unity, is easily one of the best investments I’ve ever made.
Look for Chicken Cannon in the App store in the next couple of weeks! Thanks a TON to all of you guys at UT. You guys are awesome. If it wasn’t for you, I’d have to go back to my day job.
Well, I can’t vouch for C4D or Maya, but it sure is easy to learn and is quite affordable for someone in a position like mine. Plus, it integrates seamlessly with Unity (no need to export your files, you can just save your model and it automatically gets updated in Unity).
I’m sure C4D and Maya have more features, etc. But if you’ve already laid down the cash for Unity (which is worth every penny), you may be way too strapped for C4D or Maya as I was. I don’t know how easy C4D and Maya are to learn either. I’m sure there are lots of good tutorials out there for them, but I’ve found Cheetah to be a great tool.
As for the price, I think I’m aiming for price tier 1 ($0.99 USD) with this one.
well, congratulations about the game, looks nice, i think i’ll give it a try, if it is not too expensive - but for the cheetah thing… i used cheetah for my last project, because i was not able to get my fully finished animations out of XSI (which i now have solved, i can make a tutorial if there is interrest)…
i bet you got all animations right from beginning? because i havent… ever tried to change animation timing of a character animations? say no more, say no more, nudge nudge - cheetah is a nice program, i use it primarly for getting obj files out of zbrush into unity with more or less two clicks, but when it comes to animations it is not usable at the moment. go for anything else, there are other cheap fbx exporting applications, like… blender or carrara.
I recently bought Cheetah, and it’s a great product. If you’re on the fence… I’d jump on it for the 99$ price they have it at right now. There is just something very intuitive about the interface… just like how Unity has a very intuitive and easy to use interface.
I’m new to modeling… I’ve always depended on others, but now I find making models in cheetah quite easy… thanks to the beginners tutorials… but if you are already experienced with C4D… I don’t think you’ll have a problem with cheetah.
Be sure to spring a few extra sheckles for the video training as well. It helped me enormously. Not only with using Cheetah, but also just in basic technique.
Also note that when you get the dmg file for the video tutorials, there’s an IK tutorial that isn’t indexed in the HTML pages it comes with. You’ll have to browse the content of the dmg itself to find it.
if, for example, you animate a rigged character, with a lot of bones, and notice afterwards, that some movement on the skeleton bones is too slow or too fast (which happens pretty much every time for me when i am animating), you’ll have to move every single keyframe for every bone, where on other applications you just select all keyframes and move them over. this is a few minutes in cheetah vs. 2 seconds in other applications for every character pose you did not get exactly right in the first place.
Yea… the video tutorials are great. I was really thankful for the UI mapping/unwrapping tutorial. I had never really understood how it worked.
The tutorials really cover everything. It’s broken down into modeling, texturing, animating and rendering. Rendering probably isn’t all that important… because we’re doing our rendering in unity. I didn’t even look at those tutorials… but they might be helpful when it comes to UI Baking.
G.o.D, I’d be sure to post that as a feature request for the next version if somebody hasn’t already.
kevinr, well, for a game like Chicken Cannon, rendering is important since the graphics are almost all pre-rendered. And texture baking is extremely useful as well.
G.o.D, you mentioned exporting FBX from Carrara, but I’ve been reading that Carrara, while it will export bones, won’t export the animations. Do you know if this is true?
Just a point to note, Martin who makes Cheetah3d has now finished his PhD and is from here on in working on Cheetah full time. this is quite good news really because he has good vision for where its heading, and frankly he makes really good development decisions I reckon.
So its a good app at present with a really big future. Including sprucing up its animation editing interface. Its great to use tools that develop quickly as opposed to behemoths that are stuck in heiniously slow and painful development cycles.
I am in the process of creating a 3D app with an animated human character which is done in XSI 6.5 using bone animation and managed to export it to FBX and import it back into Unity after playing around with settings quite a bit. I still haven’t quite got it right, for example the textures aren’t there etc. Do you have any tips for me and would really appreciate it if you could post a tutorial on this
the main problem for me was that you have to ‘plot’ the animation, which i didn’t know. for textures, there is usually a material created while importing - in a folder named… ‘Materials’, if i remember correctly, but you have to drag your image onto that material, which is not xsi specific but seems to be a general problem with the fbx import.
- cheetah is a nice program, i use it primarly for getting obj files out of zbrush into unity with more or less two clicks, but when it comes to animations it is not usable at the moment. go for anything else, there are other cheap fbx exporting applications, like… blender 