Hi
Just introducing myself after a few weeks lurking through the forums having a look to see what I have let myself in for.
A long while ago I downloaded Unity 2.0 and was impressed by the Island demo. Over the past year I have been building Virtual Movie Studio, which is to replace Antics 3D, which, sadly, is no longer supported. I’ve been it programing in Blitz 3D, but because of Blitz DirectX limitations was looking for something a bit more up market. Hence I reloaded Unity 2.0 and had a look. That of course led me to the forums here.
At the moment I’m still a noob with the code and all, but with all things being what they are, I’m not adverse to trying something new. In the past I have scripted with Operation Flashpoint (the original), and made models for that game and commercially for VBS1 and VBS2.
Now at this stage i’m just not sure if Unity is up for the task, as essentially VMS is an editor not a game. I’m presuming, however that Unity’s extensibility will enable me to program it for user input.
In the meantime I’m coming to grips with unity. Exploring it as it were. So far I’m impressed and even managed to get some of my old OFP and VBS models into Unity without too much trouble. Getting them to work might take a little longer. Like getting doors to work without too much code.
Here is a pic of a fishing boat using the inbuilt water and fountain particle effects. The boat isn’t user driven, yet.
I can´t tell whether unity is up for what you want to do without knowing what exactly it is what you want to do, but yeah, unity is quite capable =)
If you start a new project you should definately use unity3 instead of now way old unity 2.
Basically VMS is a virtual movie production app where the user is able to place objects, characters, etc and record the action just as you would in a real movie studio. The idea is to create a pre visualisation of a movie script for an actual movie studio to see what the screenwriter has in mind. Think of it as a 3D moving storyboard.
There’s a couple of virtual movie studio apps about; Iclone, and Moviestorm, and of course the defunct Antics 3D. I have tried all three of these, but all three have limitations. As a screenwriter and Indie film maker I’ve decided to roll my own app. That way I get the features I want. I’m hoping I can do this with Unity as it seems to be more versatile than say UDK, or some of the other engines I’ve looked at.
The pic of the fishing boat above is from Unity 3.
I’m presuming that one can develop an ingame editor or sandbox in Unity games for users to create their own game levels. This is much what I’m looking at. VMS takes this a bit further by the user. I first started this project in Dark Basic Pro, but switched to Blitz Basic, The problem with DB PRo was the lack of an inbuilt GUI designer,. With Blitz I purchased a GUI designer, which worked ok. However the GUI wasn’t the problem with Blitz, but rather the lack of further development of Blitz 3D itself; still in DirectX 7.
What I’ve liked about Unity so far is the straightforward pipleline. I’ve been able to import Max and Sketchup models without too much bother.
I’ll continue with Unity Indie for the time being as shadows and the water effects aren’t a biggie for me at the moment.
There’s a cutscene editor here…it’s unfinished and made for the editor rather than runtime, but it might give you some ideas. Unity is marketed as a game engine, but there have been a number of non-game projects done with it, and in fact that sort of thing is actively encouraged.
