Hey all, First off id like to say that unity rocks!!!
Right so Ive been into learning all the skills for game content creation for around eight months now, all my time spent on an old pc using the source engine and an older version version of the mod tool. While ive learnt alot, epecially in the last month or so, the whole process with those 2 apps in the by and large, has nearly forced me to give upon my dreams of creating my own little worlds. Not source or mod tools fault, im just not that into the heavy programming, file conversion nightmare stuff. I like to sculpt and paint and make things do a little dance and then explode into a mess of gibblets and red pixles lol. Enter Blender and unity 2.6.
Turns out they both work on my pc and are relatively stable on my pc (which is incredible, mod tool would crash all the time, Sob) and after completing the unity jump start video tutorials (which where some of the best ive come across by the way!) i’m over the moon at the concept of using these two apps in my pursuit of game content creation. I’m so exicted by prospect of reffining that little 2d space shooter i want to cry with joy.
But theres just a copple of things im not quite sure about.
Some of the blender posts here state that theres an error with the blender fbx export thingy. ive followed through to the post on blender.org and the post there sez that its was with 2.49a, i have 2.49b. (pretty sure, the most recent one beffore 2.5) will i still have the same problim with the fbx using 2.49b?
the thing im most excited about with blender is the prospect of being able to use the sculpt/renderbake features. You can’t use the next gen normapping teqniques with the old source engine so most of what ive learned i havent been able to apply to what im doing.
I was wondering what restrictions uity imposes on blender in that regard. It says it supports normals and all that, but to what extent and has any one had any problims at all getting the fully baked rig/mesh into unity. I’m assuming there might be some problims with the light maps. I was planing on avoiding them any way so have there been any other problims.
What sort of poly and texture limmits is the general rule of thumb for unity. The source angine has the gnereal rule of around 3000 polys for the mesh and 512/512 for the texture resolution. This allows for around 3/5 figures on screen.
I was hopping for my little space shooter for around 1000 for main units, abit more for bosses and alot less for everything else and hopefully more than 512 for the textures(if not fine but its just so fidilly lol).
is this realistic?, will i still be able to have a fully baked mesh and what sort of frame rate problims might arise if im over shooting with my estemits?. what would you recomend?
Is there any documentation on a funtioning but very simple exp system in jarava script. I mean like kill a bady, gets some points, at the end of the level if youve ernt enough you get to purchase upgrades.
Now im probilly dreaming but how hard would it be to use cut scenes created externaly. how much codding would it involve, would it simply be a case of telling unity to play the file beffore engaging the level? not to worried if i cant do this but it would be nice to have a little story in the background.
im sorry if this is long winded and a littel vauge. I know i havnt been doing this very long but in the time i have been at it ive learnt to model, uv/texture and animate to a level thats on par with my desire to flesh out the little sapce shooter. The only skills i really lack are in programing and after the jump start tutorial i fgure half of thats done i just need to know a few specific things to avoid wasting large amounts of time on some thing thats not feasible. in know theres a bit more reffining on the code of course and i am allready looking into reffinigng the collisions and such and maby some alternate ammo types ect. just need to learn more about jarva lol.
I been playing around with a low poly model in blender while getting to grips with the ui and thought i might as well jump the gun a bit and see if i can get it into unity and at first no go. I put it into the assets folder and it shows up straight out and im like wow. No scripting, no file conversions, no having to cross my fingers, hopping the mod tool wouldnt crash during export, No praying to the computer deitys for a clean compile to go to source. Drag drop it is there.
But after that wave of initial excitement receded, not much else happend. Couldnt drag it into the scene or the hieracy thingy and when i double clicked it to see if it would open blender it had little tiny writting down in the bottom of the screen saying blender didnt want to play so dissmay and then some head scratching…
Then i remembered that i had changed blenders directory when i first loaded up unity and that some wierd things had been happening when i tried to load up a blend file or to i figured blender might have gotten currupted or something when i dragged it from the external hard drive. I moved it cause i figured it would work better with unity if they where close to each other. any way so i uninstalled them both and loaded them back up and hey pressto! It works perfectly, every thing from blender (except the material on the model But i figure thats my faul lol) works in unity and i can drag and drop and re edit in blender with a simple double click. I am officialy hooked, i dont want to start up any fan boy nonsense but this is heaven as far as im concerned. Being able to create something and just drop it where it should go and whala!!1
And the thing that i cant get over is the not only do they both work pretty well on my old pc but there FREE !!!
I’m so into unity that im going to save for the full deal and in the mean time learn as much about code as i can lol
Thanks again
Ps Guess that solves my first question lol
Pss I set up a small scene with a plain and a light and the first person thing and about 15 of my model doing its walk cycle. it was pretty creepy watching all those guy walk in sync. I wonder if i can get them to move along an axis or 2…mmmm…lemmings lol
Just been playing around with the pre-built locomotion scenes. On my old pc i had 20 fully rigged, fully textured humanoid chracters randomly moving aorund on randomly generated terrain. The animations where great and my underpowerd system kept unity chugging along at around 15 fps. not bad imo, considering all of the random cal the pc has to do, not to mention each of the meshes weighed in at around 7000 polys. I feel i have grossly under estimated unitys abilitys. I feel some what sily and just a tad ashamed lol.
Also i was expecting unity to do the 16 bit grey scale mapping thing for normals (dont ask me why) but turns out it supports RGB parralax. I was completely speechless upon this discovery. Im pretty shure i just stared at the little channel map in all its RGB glory in total disbelief for around half an hour. I started of just wanting to make a little space shooter, oh how things have changed. Turns out jarva wasnt that hard to pick ether, well at least the easy bits any way lol.
Im a little over whelmed at the prospects of all this, i mean the possiblitys with the randomly generated stuff is just…one step at a time i geuss. Now to find out about the exp system.
Unity can push a LOT of polygons, but you want to be careful with how many polys you use for rigged/animated characters. Static scene geometry isn’t too much of a concern, but it has to recalculate vertex positions for every vertex in a skinned, animated mesh every frame. So take advantage of tools like xNormal to generate normal maps from high poly sculpts to place on your low poly ones.
Thanks for the info. Normal maps from what ive learnt in the last few days are diffenitely the way to go, im mean i knew all the theory sort of stuff i just havnt really been able to aply any of it untill now. The thing is it seems the more i learn the more there is to learn.
I figure for poly limits ill stick to around 1500/2000 for main characters. I was going to shoot for lower and have slapped together a simple character at around 500 polys but the topoligy at that resolution is a tad out and it seems to make sense to add a bit more so that when i use blenders sculpt mode theres a fairly even number of polys to handel the deformations. Plus in the locomotion demo scene the bird/stalk/heron model weighs in at around 1500 polys and with 20 on screen and all the random cal my computer can still push the 30 odd fps mark with no slow down. i doubt any thing ill conjure up will need that many models running around on screen, but im seriouly starting to consider making that rpg ive always dreamed of. The space shooter and all its 2d glory will only keep me ocupied for so long and if unity can do it then why not i geuss, lol. still a lot to learn first though… :roll:
By the way is that xnormal you mentioned a program or app? or is it a term so to speak?.
Well time to get back to it lol
Thanks again
Ps. Would it be a waste of resources to normal map every thing (well almost everything lol). I still havnt found any info on the full limtiations of unity. I know i should probilly not worry but im just really curious to know how far it can go while still holding it together. are small open worlds a possiblilty? i mean obviously nothing like oblivion or any thing but, what about somthing like zelda. mmmm…I wonder what zelda would ahve been like with this technoligy. It was a break through at the time…mmmm…starting to waffle again, sorry lol
Using normal maps won’t really slow it down much gradually, but it will take up more texture memory on the video card. So once you get above the cards video memory it will suddenly slow down a lot. Decide on the low end card you want to support and target that amount of VRAM. Also, the settings in the quality tab can help. Lower settings automatically use lower resolution textures by default, so that can help.
xNormal takes a high resolution mesh and a low resolution mesh and bakes normal maps based on the difference. It can also bake diffuse textures, ambient occlusion maps, cavity maps and a whole bunch of other stuff. It’s a very handy program to familiarize yourself with, and it’s free.
I couldnt get to the xNormal page, kept giveningme runtime errors, but i checked it out through some other sites and it looks great. Not shure it’ll work on my old card but ohwell lol. Thanks for the info on the graphics card that will be very handy in the future. I just found the section in the unity mannual that touches on optimum mesh sizes and textures and stuff and i have to say thatim still very impressed. I mean my overall poly count will have to be lower to get more on screen but thats cool. Unity has so many cool features that im not fazed at all. Its game play that matters lol.
It kind of exciting to finnlay have the right tools for the job. Now that i’ve worked through a few of the code tutorials on the net i feel a little more confident to pursue more ambtious things like te aformentioned rpg. A quick check in the scripting wikki reveled some cool thing such as randomly generated mazes and such.
I geuss ill finnish my space shooter and then start to really gear up for some thing a little more epic lol.
Thanks so much for the info niosop its much appreciated