Next-Gen Game Development Training Coming to Unity!

News & General Discussion
1

Hi everyone,

Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Leonard Gonzalez and I am the training coordinator over at i3DTutorials, an Autodesk Authorized Publisher and developer of hi-end professional training for computer graphics software, such as 3dsMax, Maya, Softimage, mental ray, etc. Our training has been used by artists working at top industry studios in film/VFX; including EdenFX and Digital Dimension, among others, as well as in the games industry, a few of these include Insomniac Games, Ubisoft, Blizzard, and Lionhead Studios.

We are happy to announce that very soon we will be bringing our industry leading training to the Unity development community by way of high quality next-gen game development training products.

I am very excited to be bringing this kind of professional game development training that has been missing from the Unity community for too long. Building on our industry praised training techniques, our next-gen game development training will be presented in an easy to follow format that uses actual production examples that correctly mimic real life production situations, instead of simple theoretical examples that are unrealistic representations of the challenges developers run into.

Our first planned release will be coming this month (November), “Next-Gen Game Development with Unity3D: Volume I”.
This is a very large and ambitious training product that will span several hours covering topics in-depth and using production samples. The focus of this volume is on Unity 3.0 itself, and how to use it to create and setup next-gen levels with the Unity Editor. Even though there are a multitude of subjects covered, the ultimate focus is on achieving the high quality visual appeal of AAA next-gen games, such as Modern Warfare 2, Killzone 2, etc. With the new powerful tools and middleware that has been incorporated into Unity 3.0, it is now possible to create incredible games with Unity that can easily achieve the same visual quality of AAA games developed on award winning engines, such as Unreal 3.

Please continue reading for more information on the topics covered by “Next-Gen Game Development with Unity3D: Volume I” and have a look at some screens from the actual tutorial itself.
Note: Screen shots are taken directly from the sample game created with this tutorial; no images have been retouched or edited- they are straight from the end results of the tutorial. Also, everything you see in the images are assets that are included with this tutorial; textures, meshes, etc.

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Below are some of the topics that are covered in-depth:

  • Unity Basics/UI

  • Working with Projects

  • Working with Assets

  • Next-Gen Materials and Shaders

  • Next-Gen Lighting

  • Using the Beast Renderer for Production

  • Post Processing and Effects

  • Optimization

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We will be releasing full details and complete information on availability and launch when we release this month. If you have any questions, please feel free to post them and I will do my best to answer them. Also, be sure to check out our website: http://i3dtutorials.com/ for great training that is currently available for 3dsMax, Maya, and Softimage.

2

Looks great

3

This does look very nice. I think the community needs some more advanced videos along these lines, similar to some of the excellent UDK training videos that have been produced that go into some relatively technical depths about materials and post-processing, etc, if not necessarily programming. There are already plenty of “how to make your first turret” tutorials out there, and this looks like the next step for a lot of people learning Unity.

Good luck with these, and I hope to see more in the series in the future!

4

Two questions:

  1. How “Autodesk-centric” are the tutorials? We’re using Blender and other non-Autodesk products so would only be interested if the tutorials are generic enough so as to be applied to the tools we use.

  2. What do the tutorials cost?

5

This is great. Although you know what I’d like? A game marketing tutorial online gaming tutorial, that’s what I think most people who’s learning should focus if they want to make money.

6

This first volume, “Next-Gen Game Development with Unity3D: Volume I”, focuses on working withing the Unity Editor environment, it does not delve into working with any Autodesk software. This makes the training generic from a DCC app standpoint. Therefore, if an artist works with Blender or Maya, it will make absolutely no difference. All of the tools and features needed to make beautiful next-gen games exist within Unity (except of course for characters, meshes, etc.).

7

Can’t wait…

8

Will be mine!
I would love to see some proper shader setup and ways to optimize the scene, especially with the environments…

In this training there will be only exterior scene or interiors as well?

I really would like to see what could be the best solution for both situation, regarding illumination of course…

Since your lesson will be focused on how to build the scene with all the elements already done in an external app, did you ( if you did it ) find a solution for normal maps on elements that are not affected by lights? I’m talking about radiosity normal maps, it will be great if you explain how to achieve something like that, simply because the overall look is much better :slight_smile:

Last question, will you ship the scene as well? or just the training video?

In the meantime I’ll wait the release :slight_smile:

9

Hi leonard !

looking pretty good, and knowing the quality of your Tutorial ( get quite a few on XSI ) I am sure that will be really usefull for lot of people , including me ^^.

10

Hi Nick3D,

Yes, the training product comes with the assets needed to follow along with the instructor, or else it wouldn’t help you too much :wink:

Our goal has always been to create the best training possible and that’s why we include assets for our training products, including our hi-end training for 3dsMax, Maya, Softimage, and mental ray. Simply put, the tutorial includes everything you need (textures, meshes, etc.) so that if you follow the instructor step by step, after several hours you will have the same scene/environment created as the instructor. The only thing you will need is Unity 3.0 Pro, a good PC/system (it’s next-gen game development after all!), and the motivation to follow along with the instructor.
As for your normal mapping question, always add occlusion and cavity mapping to your textures, this will ensure that they don’t look too flat in shadowed areas that don’t have real time lighting. This problem (pretty common by the way) is usually solved with built-in engine features. For example, Unreal 3 was recently updated to include taking into account normal maps when generating lightmaps using Unreal Lightmass. So basically, they used to have this problem too until a fairly recent update. Like I said, try adding more detail in your textures when you run into this problem, cavity mapping is a good start.

Hi Guillaume, how have you been? Are you working on any Unity projects at the moment?

11

Hi Leonard, well yes I am working on some iPhone things right now with unity…I didn’t really had a chance to play with NextGen in unity too much till now ^^.

12

I would love to see some shader tutorials also. It is all pretty nice and all having a ‘simpler’ shader engine and real handy to have a visual shader editor and all… but if you look at all those connected blocks and go “huh?” … it just doesn’t help me any :frowning:

13

Any release date for this tutorial?

14

Wow~~.great art!!

15

No any???

16

I asked on their forum a couple of days ago but haven’t received a reply yet.

17

They wrote it’s next-gen, so it probably takes a couple of years.

18

No, since its next-gen, then that means you have to wait for the next generation, which is Star Trek TNG.

19

ok, guys… now I understand! :slight_smile:

20

Hahaha thats pretty funny and true at the same time.

But yeah I’m still looking forward to these tutorials definitely.