Simply Art Gallery Project Questions

Unity Engine
1

My roomate does a lot of paintings and after seeing his website (it is horrible), I suggested we create him a 3D Art Gallery where people can check out his paintings in a…better way :slight_smile: I was going to do it with Ogre3D since I am experienced with it, but it wasn’t right for this project. I have been tinkering with Unity3D all morning and I am extremely impressed! I do have a few questions though…

1) Where can I read up on creating a character? Everything I have found is extremely over complicated for my needs. I simply just need to a first person camera that can move around the little 3D scene. I assume I will need to add a character controller and parent a camera to it, but doing this in Unity3D is a bit rough since I can’t find any information on it (short of reading massive tutorials on creating entire games).

2) I am building the art gallery out of cube’s for the walls/floor/etc. Eventually I might try creating a better looking “art gallery” model in Blender, but for now this will be fine. Is there any way to just texture one face of the cubes so the others aren’t rendered to improve performance? Dragging a texture onto a cube textures the entire thing.

3) What would be the best way for me to set this up so the actual images of the paintings that are shown can be changed easily? I will probably just put cube’s on the walls and apply pictures of his paintings to them as a texture. I would like to make it so he can switch out the paintings at a later time though.

Thanks for helping a newbie in advance!

2

  1. If you want to learn how to set up a character, take a closer look at the tutorials - they aren’t as complicated as they sound and they’re fairly modular. It sounds like you basically need a character controller, a camera, and a script that’ll move the character controller the way you want it to move.

  2. No. If you’re worried about improving performance you should be creating geometry in an external program anyway. Trying to customize the default cube has a bad cost to benefit ratio.

  3. Depends on how comfortable you are with Unity and scripting. The simple way (if he’ll have access to the Unity project) is just to have a material per painting, add more as required, and re-assign materials as needed inside the editor. Otherwise, you could do something fancy like use the WWW class to load images off the web so he could refresh his gallery by uploading new images.

hope that’s helpful

3

Thank you very much for the reply and information.

  1. I found this tutorial which looks perfect, except the Unity3D I just installed today seems to be missing the “Standard Assets”. I have “Standard Assets (Mobile)” but it lacks the “First Person Controller” as shown in that tutorial. Pretty sure I installed everything right so I am a bit lost.

  2. Yeah, I figured that was the case. Just thought while I make a little Prototype I would try and atleast be efficient but I will just leave it.

  3. He isn’t much of a computer guy so I will probably opt for the WWW class if I get everything else functioning as it is should.

Edit

Nevermind, I just realized that all of the asset packages are listed as “Standard Assets” when added.