Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The Plan
Here's the plan for this chapter. First, out of necessity, we will very quickly
look at the Unity interface. Because this is covered fairly well in the free Unity
documentation we won't spend a lot of time covering all the details of what is
what, but we will spend just a bit of time understanding what these parts are
and how best to use them.
After a quick run through the interface, we will jump back into Maya to explore
how best to prepare the file for export. There is always a bit of cleaning that
can be done to make the process smoother. Here we will also discuss how best
to transfer the files into Unity, and why I argue to always do the .fbx export
manually (and not simply drag the .mb into the Unity assets folder).
Finally, back in Unity we will import our completed scene and do a bit of
optimizing to make sure the game can run smoothly. We will optimize our
textures, and dig down to find the resolution we need to give the visual effect
we want while keeping the amount of resources required to run the game low.
Unity Projects
One of the reasons Maya and Unity make so much sense as sister technologies
is that Unity's working structure is much like Maya's. Among the equivalencies
is the importance of the project file. In the Maya chapters we worked very
hard to establish a project and to make sure all relevant assets were stored in
the appropriate locations within this project file. Unity is the same way—in
fact, Unity will not even open unless there is a project defined.
Before we get to defining projects, we need to talk a bit about how Unity
creates and deals with projects.
Like Maya, when a project is created in Unity, a new folder is created on the
hard drive. This folder will include several subfolders that we will get into later.
This folder is important in several ways, and treating this folder right will be
important to an uninterrupted creation process.
Tutorial 5.1: Creating a Unity Project
If you have not downloaded and installed Unity at this point, please do so
now. Remember the standard Unity license is free and available at http://
www.unity3d.com . Just go to the Download section. There are some very
nice features in Unity Pro (real-time shadows, deferred rendering, occlusion
culling), but to learn Unity, there is plenty that can be done with the standard
(and free) Unity.
To set up a new Unity project and to set up Unity to effectively allow for the
management of projects, do the following.
Step 1: After installing Unity, when run, Unity will present a Unity-Project
Wizard window ( Figure 5.1 ). This Wizard has two tabs: the Open Project
and Create New Project.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search