What courses do you recommend taking in the the unity premium?

Hello all
as the unity premium are open what courses do you recommend me to take ? i have 20 years of c++/java experience and basic blender modeling experience .
im interested in 3d gaming . Thanks

None.

None of them.

ok…
what do you recommend ?
and why you done recommend any of the premium ?

what do you want to learn? programming, or modeling, or the whole set to make simple game alone?
or just started with unity editor and need to learn how to use it? (then should look those editor basics first)

btw. pluralsight has 1 free month offer going on.

You said you have 20 years of C++ experience. You can simply go through manual and script reference, experiment and get yourself to speed in 2 months or so.

Although catching up with some 3d-related stuff might make sense.

i want to whole set to make simple game alone
no problem in the programming area i need to learn all the things besides programming
but i do need to know the UNITY api

how the pluralsight courses what do you recommned ?

If premium is affordable it won’t hurt to try one to get a good grounding in your interests. You can always cancel. Also I recommend just starting with a very small demo like rolling a ball… From there harass the forum for each issue you have.

(it’s what we’re for)

After a while you’ll naturally harass the forum a bit less as your knowledge grows and you know what to search for online. Typically there’s 2 gaps I’ve observed in learning Unity:

  1. between on boarding and your own goals
  2. between terminology and research

So you maybe will benefit from a premium course to start, plus any free learning, then have forum plug your terminology knowledge… past that you’ll probably need learning material less and forum less.

It’s a natural evolution but starting with a learn course or even a premium course can on board well, and the rest comes in stages. You’ll outgrow things in their natural order.

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As many as possible, especially those that involve the editor.

Not sure if everyone is thinking it’s expensive, because they are all free right now for a few months. Not that that is a fantastic reason to skip good courses in any case.

Every software takes familiarization. It doesn’t matter where you come from, going through some basic courses is the best way to start. Game development is not the same as most things that involve C++/java, not even remotely. It’s not even a programming-centric field - the API and basic coding knowledge is almost everything you need to start.

Learning API must be done together with making stuff happen in the scene, and you can’t do that by reading magic documentation. Do some tutorials and learn the API in a practical way. Step by step tutorials teach you that when you do X, Y happens in your game.

The first thing I did in Unity was the space shooter tutorial, with me writing every line of code, pausing the video and messing around with values to see what happens, etc. Even now years later that I can do almost anything in Unity that I want to, going through some super basic tutorial on a feature teaches me something I would hardly have known otherwise.

Do tutorials, they are good.

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I went through the premium course list a few days after the “three months of premium access for free!” announcement and I didn’t see anything in there that really offered much of anything, if I’m being honestly. If you’re new to Unity but not programming, just go through the interface guide that’s been in the free section forever. If you want to accomplish something specific, just google it.

Learn Premium isn’t even worth it when free, let alone when it costs money.

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UNity API is in ScriptReference section. It is highly likely that with programming experience Script Reference and Manual are the only things you’re going to need.
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/index.html

Ouch. I never looked into it because I’m not a tutorials person and learn better by tinkering & manuals… but I didn’t imagine it was that bad. What would you say is the problem? Lack of depth? Few topics covered?

Almost everything that’s in there is and has been available from reputable sources online for ages, basically. The stuff that’s there that isn’t available elsewhere is the kinda stuff that should be explained in documentation, which is something people have been asking for for ages. For a good example, there’s a course in premium called “C# Survival Guide” which is pretty much the exact stuff you can get from w3schools for free.

The only thing I can say might be worth it is the XR stuff, but even then that’s kinda high concept enough that an experienced developer should be able to figure it out by looking at proper documentation.

Learn Premium genuinely feels like it doesn’t have a niche to fill.

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Do as many free project based tutorials as you need until you start feeling comfortable enough to do things on your own.

I wouldn’t pay for tutorials - there is too many available for free.

Emphasis on project based. This way you get a sense of the overall process. That’s the thing you want to understand first. Not details.

Then start making complete games.

As far as art goes, focus first on the fundamentals. And then focus on the fundamentals. That’s all that matters. As a soloist you don’t need to get any deeper than that.

To learn how to make art, make a lot fast. High volume. Get outsider feedback on everything you create. Feedback from professional artist is good, but also get feedback from gamers. That will help you avoid getting into perfectionism, which many artist suffer from. Improving art seems to be more a matter of reduction than anything else. Every time I make a big leap forward, it’s usually because I simplified something.

Photoshop for 2d, blender for 3d. Again, youtube is full of excellent free tutorials.

I think it fills the niche of decent quality tutorials from a place newcomers know is a reliable source. It lets Unity help people get started and rolling along with the Unity editor and some coding. It also allows Unity to show off some various things they’ve developed.

Yes, you can certainly find tons of tutorials out there on the web, but how does a newcomer know what are good and what are garbage? Even reviews don’t always help. I wasted far too much time on getting part way through tutorials only to figure out that they were either not telling me anything beyond the mere basics, or that the tutorial was really utter garbage.

Just looking for paid tutorials also doesn’t help since there are courses on sites like Udemy that shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves educational.

There’s also the problem that many free and paid tutorials spend much of their time covering the same things everyone else covers, with only the occasional nugget of useful information. At least Unity can try and focus on putting together a coherent lesson plan for their customers.

I don’t know that I would have spent the money to buy premium – in a large part because I hate video tutorials and prefer finding written sources – but as I have gotten value out of the free period, I can’t say that the lessons are worth nothing.

My experiences dealing with newcomers is that they don’t necessarily see the official learning section as a reliable source and a not insignificant part of it is due to the tutorials saying they’re for releases that are more than a year old.

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I have to agree about the overall quality, it could be much better. It’s not very well organized and the topics are all over the place. I feel like it’s presented with more of a concern about the user’s difficulties in focusing rather than with an eye to progressing the user through levels of knowledge and experience.

Also there’s some very old stuff there and it makes me wonder whether it’s all up to date.

My perspective about doing courses/tutorials still holds though. I think they are essential. I’ve done them for both Unity and Blender (Blender ones were not free and extremely helpful). I especially recommend any game example tutorials - Unity’s (then free) roll-a-ball and space shooter were both very helpful for me to get a foot in the door with the API.

You made a really long reply that seems to go out of its way to ignore some key points I made in my post and instead focused on the last sentence.

The niche it feels is monetizing Unity newbies.

Otherwise, most Unity produced tutorials are much more confusing and they need to be and they often teach things wrong and lots of people have picked up bad habits because they saw something in a Unity tutorial.