I have been spending many hours this week working on some test project in Unity 5 concentrating on the new features available now so get ready for the next post. Given the simplified versions I have shown here just adding additional rendering effects improves the look an order of magnitude.
Unity and Visual Studio
This week I have spent most of my time with in Unity 5. Understanding and digesting what has changed has been a little difficult as there is no comprehensive list of changes. I have found the best way to achieve this is to work through the Unity Learning tutorials. I finished the Roll-a-Ball mini game and found quite quickly if there may be an issue with some code. Unity will catch the change and try to make the change for you, handy to say the least. One thing I have found and you are not warned about are the GUI differences and that is because the legacy GUI items e.g. GUIText is still available just not from your typical game object menu list as before. Because of this, the code will still work and you will not receive any compile errors however your results will not be what you expect. With a little searching of the web, YouTube, Unity Answers or the Unity Community you can find the solution you are looking for and if you study the code you can actually understand what is happening.
An old problem I have had was using Visual Studio as my default script editor. Each time I would pick a script to edit a new instance of Visual Studio would be opened instead of a new tab in the existing instance. Well, today there was a post in Unity Answers that addressed this specific issue and I was able to get this working beautifully today. In that same post there was a link to “Visual Studio 2013 Tools for Unity” and just reading about some of the features and they look very promising, love the API reference right in Visual Studio 🙂
Unity Personal Edition
Well, sometimes wishes do come true.
I had said I was hoping Unity Free would go away, have pro features for everyone or maybe a subscription type of system. Well the best of both worlds happened last week. Unity released version 5 with a Pro subscription of 75.00/month or 1500.00 for a perpetual license and the old Free version of Unity has been put to the pasture. They released the Personal Edition having all of the features of Pro with none of the restrictions the old free version had, with the exception of a splash screen for the personal edition and no dark skin.
The pro subscription gives you asset store 11 which is monthly deals provided only to pro users etc.. Team licenses (I think that is what it is called, cloud storage, pro community access and other things, none of which interest me.
If you want some funny reading you should head on over to the Unity community ‘discussion’ thread and look at all the bitching about the splash screen specifically the words ‘personal edition’ within the splash. The absolute childishness of some of these people is revolting (although funny).
I am loving the anouncment, Unity Pro is now free. 🙂 🙂
Unreal Engine (UE4) – Free
Yesterday I heard about and then received an email confirming that UE4 has been released for free. Previous subscribers will be given a 30.00 credit to the online store but the major news is no more monthly payments. I is all free now. This news could not come at a better time. I had been pondering the thought of purchasing a pro licence for Unity3d for 1500.00 and then I would need to maintain the license every year (1500.00 again). UE4 going free put a new spin on everything entirely while I wait for Unity’s big anouncment to happen today. I am hoping for Unity free to go away and have just the pro version for everyone and maybe a subscription rate because I have gotten used to Unity’s work flow but I’m not to invested time wise with it so switching would not be that much of a problem.
Time to wait for the announcement……
Python
I have been spending a lot of time messing with Python scripting this last week. It has been interesting how most of the stuff I have learned on Codecademy and other books for the last few months has actually stuck with me.
My recent purchases have really made all the difference in the world on how and when I can practice. I will relate those in the next blog post. The main purchase was a new computer, which one will remain a secret until next week but it is, next to my main computer the best purchase I have made in quite some time.
Also, the addon I have decided to write has been defined. It is not exactly what I originally had in mind but will workout perfectly with this new computer.
Blender Models export to Unity
I have been doing some experimenting with exporting models from Blender to Unity3d using the FBX export and have found more success than failures. I found this strange as it seems when I read about others in the Unity Community exporting the same way there seem to be a plethora of problems.
I created this simple pad in blender
Using these settings I exported the file as an FBX, placed the file with my assets in the Unity project. The secret for proper orientation from Blender to Unity? Make sure Forward is “-Y Forward” and Up is “Z Up”. As you can see, this is how the model is prepared within Blender NOT how you wish to see it in Unity. When I first did an export I had this backwards.
After adjusting the scale factor to one and removing any inspector clean up (apply any changes) I drop the new asset into the scene. With this result and as you can see the item is place properly with orientations correct for a Unity asset.
Once I figured out the proper way to import the asset from Blender I created a preset within the FBX export panel. This way I have these settings ready for any other assets created within Blender.
Unity and Playmaker
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.
Virtual Airplane Modeling
You do learn new things everyday. Reading through the Virtual Airplane Modeling books I found how to render motion blur using Blender internal. First image below is without motion blur and the second is with.
Cool huh?
New Books
This week I purchased the first two volumes of “Virtual Airplane Modeling” as a back up for when trying to model the basice shape of the Me262 aircraft, if things start to go wonky I can look at the authors technique. So far, starting out the first volume has been a rehash of most Blender books (Downloading, installing, basics) but I find a lot of this information interesting in a ‘book writing’ way. I want to complete a book myself one day and while I am reading about topics I am very familiar with I enjoy learning from others writing styles.
Me262A-1a
I started the Me262 model yesterday afternoon by parting out one of my reference images into the three essential images for modeling (Top, Front and Right side). If I need them I also have the Rear, Bottom and Left side views as well. As the title of this post suggests, the model is of the Me262 I am going to create is the A-1a variant. I have references for all the other models as well and we will see, once I am finished with this one how difficult it would be to morph the creation into the subsequent models. This aircraft is a little different in the the body style transitions from your typical cone at the nose to more of a triangular shape back toward the tail. It is because of the shape of this aircraft that I believe this is one the more beautiful aircraft of World War Two. If I can work through that transition this will be a great modeling experience for me.
