I took a little break from modeling because I got the urge to play with Unity a bit. I purchased the Playmaker Functional State Machine (FSM) and I thought I better learn how to use it at least a little since I paid 95.00 for it. I found it is remarkably easy to use and quickly created a small scene in Unity using the dresser asset I created. Creating animations for the opening and closing of the drawers and then using Playmaker to open/close them using buttons was a piece of cake. I literally watched the video last night before bed, opened Unity this morning and created this in about an hour or two. I had to start over a couple times on the animations because my mac book air kept freezing up on me. Other than those little hiccups it was quit easy.

Here is a screen shot while I was working leading me to an observation. Why do people complain about Blenders User Interface (UI) when the UI of Unity is FAR from perfect and FAR from any sort of standardization. I’m thinking that because Blender is free and open source the users think they have a right to complain to the Blender Foundation when they don’t get things their way. This may be an offshoot of a statement made similar to this, “You have your own 3d application…” which you do, meaning you can modify the program as you wish to meet your needs. Not necessarily that the developers will modify the program as you wish.
Unity costs a pretty penny and you don’t hear near the number of complaints about the UI. Probably the Unity users realize the don’t OWN anything. They have to pay for the right use use the program every year!

Off my soapbox. Here are my results.

Video placed in YouTube showing the results of Playmaker and Unity (Not much but then again it doesn’t take much to impress me these days.

Chapter 9 is starting to kick my butt. It is not the chapter itself but Unity crashed on me (for the first time) and I had not been saving the scene and project like I usually do. I have had to back up and figure out what actually saved and what did not, I know all the C# scripts are saved but not what has been saved within the project.

Dang, now it seems like I did not save some of the things I had done yesterday. The reward systems looks to be working ok but now the countdown percent does not seem to be consistent. When the percent get to zero the garden gnome stops all function properly but the stork still delivers after I have only one bunny left. It should stop counting down.

Looks like i have some trouble shooting to do tomorrow morning. The trouble shooting process really brings to light what I have learned and what I am just doing verbatim by the book without learning. Hopefully not the latter and troubleshooting will go soothly.

I am having so much fun working in this book it is hard to stop. I have not moved over to the other computer so I have not been able to get any screen shots. I will tomorrow morning.

One good thing about having this time off is I can work in Unity and Blender without having to stop and go to bed because I have to get up in the morning. I am currently nearing the middle of chapter 7, have had no real issues with the book so far. I’m not sure she takes as much time to explain some of the tasks as she should but having touched and scanned through books on Unity, C# programming, when she says do this, I automatically do it without thinking how. In some cases the how is a little important and I don’t think as much detail is placed there. Other than that, I am enjoying this book very much. As I am working on my macBook Air right now through Dropbox I don’t have Camtasia or Snagit handy to snap a pic for you. As soon as I get a chance I will snap a pic and post it to this post.

Having a great time and, I think, starting to feel better.

Talks to ya Monday!

I failed to get mecanim to work in the two days I gave myself. I spend too much time on the book and moving forward there. I am currently in the middle of chapter four but have already read the entire chapter, working through the tasks within in the chapter (scripting) take a little longer as I have to type in the script, absorb it watch it execute etc.. The next chapter in the book is about mecanim but I do have the proper components and animations into an animation controller within Unity so it is taking a little longer than I thought but Friday we should be all thumbs up 🙂

So far working through the new book Unity for Absolute beginners has been great. As I had said previously, the last book was riddled with errors but so far even though there were plenty of errors I had learned a lot and working with this new book has been great.

I also found a video created by Unity for animating anything using Mecanim. While I have found the videos published by Unity are severely lacking in specifics you can get where you need to go from the starting point they get leave you at. With that said, I should have the drawers on my dresser opening and closing using the Mecanim animation system as well as the legacy system. One piece of information the video left we with was that Mecanim is a state machine and having that knowledge leads me to believe this is the system I should be using for my game. Hopefully the next entry should have some videos with mecamin in action.

Yes, as I said in my last post I am back to the Unity Books. I re-downloaded the book files in case they may have been updated during the time I was away.

I was able to apply the animations and when I clicked play the worked! That was my goal for yesterday afternoon and things went so smoothly, much more so than I thought. I was finished within 10 minutes. I decided to take it a step further (remember, baby steps) and write a script to run the animation from the idle state and open a drawer when you press a key. The book I was referencing at the time had a very basic script to do just that and I modified it so you could open/close what ever drawer you wanted by pressing a key, 1-4 (drawers counting clockwise). As written the script did not seem to work without throwing any errors, syntax or otherwise. When I placed sections of the code into the update method rather than the start method like the author had it, it worked great. The amount of errors I see in some of these books out there is amazing. Who proofreads or edits them? These books run upwards of 3o.00!

Tonight I went back to the book ‘Unity for absolute beginners’, picking up where I had left off. The author is going to run through animation techniques using the Mecanim system in Unity vs the legacy system I used for the dresser drawers. When tried to open the project I could not find it anywhere on my hard drive. I think because the project was titled ‘Unity Test’ as per the book I deleted the folder in error. No worries, I caught myself up this evening to, just about to the point I was at prior to setting it aside for a bit.

Here is very brief glimpse of one of the drawers opening in Unity.

See ya Friday!

My goal this evening is to have my animations working when I press play. At this point I am taking this one step at a time. I have created the asset, my dresser. I have created the simple animation of the drawer opening. I actually created two animations without realizing it. I created one animation of the first drawer on the upper row opening slowly and another animation of the last drawer on the lower row opening fast. It appears the way the animations were imported I can use them on any part of the dresser including the dresser itself. I have imported everything into Unity, game objects, materials and textures. The animations work great in the preview window, now to add the game object to the scene and get the animation working when I press play.