Welcome to the official support thread for the book, “Creating 3D Game Art for the iPhone with Unity iOS.”
I hope that you are enjoying the book and if you have any questions on the book or would like to discuss any related game development topics, please post them here.
Haven’t picked up the book yet? You can find more information on the book’s content as well as the Table of Contents here!
Thanks and I look forward to getting some good discussions on Unity game development going!
hi there,
well i used to working with maya (though it has been for aometime since last use), does this book suit me also? does it cover working with modo and blender ? cause theses are “heavy” programs. and for the unity part, does it cover all the aspect of finishing the game process such as loading it to app store, and the iphone unity addon (which i yet to buy).
this will be my first game (already got some enginge parts working and some layouts) so please help in directing me to the right resorce.
tnx,
amit.
This book uses modo and Blender to demonstrate the concepts, however any 3D application can be used. There is nothing that is modo or Blender specific that would stop a user of another 3D application from following along.
The book doesn’t cover all aspects of game development such as uploading to the App Store, covering the iOS SDK and coding. This books is focused on creating optimized 3D content specifically targeted to the iPhone and iPad platforms. With that said, it’s not just an art book as there is a lot of technical principles described in terms of Unity iOS and the iDevice hardware.
If you’re working on your first game, I’d say you’re going to need some additional resources beyond this book. However, this book will be helpful understanding how to create optimized game assets.
Will your book help me? Because I have reached the 3d modelling stage.
Btw theres no Kindle here in India and I cannot find link to the google books. Dont you have a format which I can use offline, maybe a protected pdf or something.
This book is different in terms of a game development book in that I don’t go through step-by-step tutorials. The reason being is that I didn’t want the book to be a re-hash of the typical low-polygon modeling workflow that most game development resources go through. Instead, the book’s focus is on teaching the core principles behind the “why” models, UVs and textures need to be created with very specific guidelines for use with Unity iOS.
The book thoroughly covers the iDevice hardware as it relates to game development and uses this information to discuss the correct methodology for building optimized game content for Unity iOS. The book is not a beginners guide in that the reader should already know modeling, UV mapping and texturing. The book’s purpose is to take what you know and apply that towards creating optimized content for the iOS devices using Unity.
The book covers the usage of modo and Blender to illustrate the topics, however, any 3D app can be used. The book discusses vertex count, mesh borders and UV seams as they relate to increasing the vertex count, so using Blender is perfectly fine as the same toolset used in the book is found in Blender. The book uses modo for modeling and Blender for rigging, skinning and animation.
I’m sorry, but I don’t have a PDF version of the book. The only E-Books are that for Kindle and Google Books. Here’s the link to the book on Google Books.
This will definitely come handy down the line for me Wes, maybe in a month or two.
K then the option I have is to get the physical book.
Can you sell directly to me? If I buy through amazon or other stores the shipping will cost me a lot, while you can ship me directly using normal snail mail which will cost me much less. You must have some printed copies with you.
Please can you give me shipping cost from your place to Kolkata, India? No express postage and private message me your email.
In your book you mentioned it’s recommended to have less than 30 bones for a character. But can you show me how does performance drop if I increase the bones count from for example 21 to 30?
If the character is an enemy and will have multiple instance rendering at the same time, will the performance drop even more if I increase its bones count?
Also if I have two types of AI, one of them can only perform simple movement for example walking and the other can walk and punch, performance wise, does it make sense to make two different rigging for them so the simple AI will have less bones to deform with? Or is it better to let as many character sharing the same rigging as possible? (let’s not consider work load yet)
Sorry I got a lot of questions. I’m such an amateur at animation.
That’s kind of tough to answer in terms of performance drop. Depending on your game, it may not drop much or it could be significant. It depends on several factors.
Vertex Count: With newer hardware 3GS and Up, you can have around 15K skinned vertices. So if you’re going to have a lot of skinned characters in your scene, you’ll want to lower their vertex count per enemy mesh. You mentioned having different rigs. You can actually reuse the rig if you keep the naming convention the same. I would concentrate on lowering the vertex count to increase performance. Remember, it’s always a give and take. If you have more characters per scene, you’ll have to lower the vertex count per character to compensate. The lower the bone count, the better. The less data to calculate will always give you better performance. Only include the bones that directly influence the mesh when you export the FBX file.
Skinning Quality: You can set the skinning quality which can improve performance as well. This works in 1, 2 or 4 bones per vertices. Using a weighting of 4 bones per vertex is going to be more expensive. Lowering the quality will lower the quality of the animation.
Hope this helps! Let me know if any of this needs more clarification.
Yes, if using Blender, disabling “deform” is the option you want. This will not allow the bone to influence vertices. It won’t remove it on export, but it is doing what you really need, which is removing the bone from influencing vertices. The more bones that are influencing vertces during deformation, the more data that needs to be processed, which can degrade performance.
Hi!!
First of all, hat off to this really useful and amazing book.
I´d like to know just a bit deeper your wokflow with the Pano2VR tool…I´m applying the mirror ball exporting option, image size to 2048 (mistake number 1 maybe?), I set the input type to auto…should I modify the output options? Because right now I´m obtaining kind of weird /funny skyboxes with holes after applying the polar coordinates.
Thanks and congrats for the book…it´s being really helpful!
Hi Wesm,
I do not own your book at the moment but I thought your article on IOS Profiler in Unity IOS in Unity Creative Jan/Feb 2011 was good, I did use it this morning to get started with iOS profiling in xcode.
If you don’t mind I have a question -
when I look at profiling data in xcode 4.0.2, the profiling stats are in one huge file together with tons of other non-profiling-lines of text.
I have to scroll up and down a lot to find each set of profiling stats. In your article you show 3 sets of profiling updates in one page, is there an option in xcode to only show iPhone Unity Internal profiler stats? Of did you simply copy chunks of stats to a new text file so you could look at a few sets of stats that way?
