I downloaded the free version of unity and went through the 3DPlatformTutorial and that was fine. However, I am interested in developing games for the iphone/ipad and other apps that need 3D graphics. Is there any reasonable way to get my feet wet before I invest the $400 fee for unity ios? I am a one person show here and $400 is a lot of money to me right now. Thanks for any advice.
All you can do is get stuck in. In one month with Unity and a little hard work (and a lot of reading) you should be in a position to make the decision. You don’t need great graphics to make a game that’s fun - it’s the core logic that’s important - you can use primitives in Unity (like cubes and spheres) as placeholders for your gfx.
There are a couple books at amazon.com that can point you in the right direction.
You don’t need a phone to develop with unity. At worst case after the month or so developing and you choose to get ios unity, you will only need a few lines of code to change touch stuff.
The rest works out of the box. Optimising it for mobile is fairly easy to do as well, and the least of your problems.
Thanks all for your help. I’m going to take your advice and plug away with an idea for a month or so and then decide whether to invest the $400 or not.