1: Aiming weapons(i.e moving hands with gun to point up or down). Do you animate all the pose directions in your modeling program or is there any good way.I’m a beginner and the 3rd person shooter and most other unity projects are not really explained so they are too difficult for beginners. Too many interconnected parts to grasp quickly.
2: Textures: Planning, limits to your texture sizes, multiple for a character? etc. Where can beginners learn to translate photoshop texture making tutorials to gimp(The filter options are different etc.), Photos vs hand drawn, etc.
3: Large levels. Is there any way to use large levels without wasting too much processing power and is modular building really the best all the time?
4: How do you plan your models (cars, characters, etc) The projects don’t explain this but I think it’s important. Take for example, the car tutorial; Users are not warned about certain things like orientation and centers(wheels, colliders etc) so after using the project files, they make their own models and start a really frustrating journey trying to make theirs work. These things should be explained as guidelines in the projects. Unity is supposed to make things easier but beginners are made to spend time worrying about unnecessary things.
Multiplayer: What would you advise beginners to consider? If the game has both single and multiplayers, how would you go about the scripting?
Gameaddict, i think you are asking something very important; i’m a newbie too and the answers for your questions could be very helpful.
1- I guess you could make a character whose body is composed of three parts -head, torso and legs- animated separately, with basic movements. If you need to adjust something, you could do it using the animation panel (i think there is such of thing).
2- No idea; i work with Photoshop.
3- You need to make focus on optimizing technics to obtain maximun performances; although i guess there is a method that allows you to load levels progresively, by demand (in the same scene).
Thanks. I really need answers to 1 and 4. I’ve been learning unity and blender for two months now. I want to make a multiplayer shooter as my first project but I’m being delayed by those problems.
I don’t understand what you mean by animating different parts. Could you explain more? My character parts are modeled as seperate objects but joined and rigged together.
The aiming is the most important part right now. I can’t use the mouselook for aiming because it turns the whole model and other players will see it happening.
I’ll try to answer the ones that I am qualified to answer. I am more of an artist than a programmer, so I can only really take on those questions (and I’m only starting out myself in game art, too).
There’s a few ways you can do this. What I would do personally is have the left and right axis for aiming just be shifting the character, and have two simple animations of the character aiming up and aiming down. That is enough to have a good looking animation of the character aiming.
Textures: It’s best to create your texture in as large as possible while creating the assets. I aim for 2048x2048 for a normal model, up to 4096x4096 for something that needs to be particularly detailed. Then once the game is ready, you can go through in Unity and fine tune the texture size against the performance and VRAM usage.
Large levels: The actual level mesh itself doesn’t have to be too many polys if you’re clever about the design. Break it up into meshes large enough that the player is only seeing one of the level meshes, or two at the most during a transition. Unity will not draw a mesh that the player isn’t looking at, so that allows you a lot of flexibility.
I like to use modular level design, but I will combine all those parts into one mesh to optimise it (and use the one material). Modular design is mostly to make less work for me when creating a level. If possible, make everything modular. You’ll spend more time, but you never know when you can use the same asset somewhere else.
Planning: I’ll often take a look at how someone else has done it if it’s something I’ve never done before… but there’s really only a small amount of tricky assets: characters and vehicles for the most part. Unity is supposed to make things easier, but you’d be mistaken if you think it’ll make things easy. Some cases are unique and you’ll have to figure it out yourself. Other times, you may have to look up the answer or ask it - Unity Answers is a very good resource for that.
Multiplayer: My advice for a beginner is not to try and tackle multiplayer. You’ll just be biting off more than you can chew. Start with a good single player game, once you have that down you’ll have enough experience to try and make it multiplayer. Then pick up a good book on networking.
About textures: Sometimes, while I’m switch from the editor to another program and then back to unity, a little gui appears and shows it’s reimporting textures. Is this normal? I’ve been saving my textures in .psd and the sizes are usually large. I also have occasional temp resize errors and sometimes the program crashes especially when using blender and unity at the same time.
Unless you’re aiming for relatively high-end systems, you should stick to 2048x2048 max, since many Intel integrated chips only go that high, and unfortunately that kind of system makes up a fairly large percentage of computer users.
Turn off “compress textures when importing” in the prefs.
What I was referring to was creating the textures, as the PSD files. Certainly 4096x4096 is excessive for an in-game texture size, but you can then downsize it in Unity to an appropriate size. But keeping the large base texture gives you more options in the future.
Also, I forgot to add that as far as animating aiming goes, you can procedurally animate the bones in code, instead of manually creating aiming animations. Although you have to be careful about limiting it, or you can get some exceedingly unnatural positions for the arms…
Thanks Eric. I know it’s possible to animate the bones with code but I’m new to this and I still don’t understand the code from the 3rd person shooter. I even tried the script with my model but I could not get it to work correctly.
I created separate animations for the aim directions but I can’t get them to work. How do I know when if the mouse input axis is positive or negative on the y axis so I can change and stop animations?