You've just installed Unity and don't know where to start, or simply wish to learn about new features that come with the fifth version of this engine. It doesn't matter if this is your first game engine or you are thinking of making a smooth transition to it, this book has got you covered. Throughout this book, you will be creating an outdoor environment, learning associated tools and features by following practical examples in a step-by-step fashion and solidifying your knowledge by completing practical tasks. Complementary files will allow you to start from any chapter you are interested in and also serve as a catch-up option if you don't wish to complete the tutorials. By the end of this book, you will know how to apply your knowledge of level design, animation, modeling, and much more to the best engines on the market.
Chapter 1, Meet Unity, introduces you to the Unity editor and basic tools used throughout the book. We will start from the very beginning by creating a starting project, discussing available windows, parameters, scene navigations, and package imports, and close this chapter with the challenge of recreating a custom window layout.
Chapter 2, Importing and Configuring Props, explains the process of exporting assets from 3D modeling apps and importing them into Unity, followed by their configuration, tuning, and troubleshooting common errors. By the end of the chapter, we will look into new materials introduced in Unity 5 and set up LODs for imported assets.
Chapter 3, Shaping Landscape, dives into the process of creating a terrain for the outdoor environment, as well as foliage, water, skyboxes, and trees.
Chapter 4, Dealing with Basic Animations, gives us the first look at how to handle animations in Unity 5. We will look into the Legacy system, the pros and cons of using it, import animations for the props, and use them to trigger scripts.
Chapter 5, Invite Your Characters to Unity, guides you through the entire process of how to import a humanoid character and get it prepared for the Mecanim animation system, as importing characters into Unity can cause a lot of problems if not done correctly.
Chapter 6, Using Mecanim for Advanced Animations, uses mocap animations and creates a basic locomotion state control to demonstrate the power of Mecanim.
Chapter 7, Lighting Up the World, explains what built-in Enlighten is capable of doing and talks about some limitations that come with it by lighting up an interior scene. Realtime Global Illumination boosted Unity's rendering capabilities through the roof. We will also look into other features such as light probing, reflection probes, lightmapping, projectors, light cookies, halos, and lenses.
Chapter 8, Bringing the Sound, discusses how the sound works and sets up the ambient sounds and music for our level using Audio Mixer.
Chapter 9, Exploring the Particle System, provides you with a practical example of creating a particle system, recommendations, tips and tricks, and a challenge to create your own particle system with provided resources. Although particles are fun, they can be overwhelmed by a variety of options available in the Particle editor.
Chapter 10, Final Editing and Build, enables us to get our character to walk around the level, talk about the project and quality settings, and finish with a playable build of our level.
The only essential software for this book is obviously Unity 5.0.1. The example and tutorials shown are mostly incompatible with the earlier versions of Unity. A 2D drawing and a 3D modeling software will allow you to follow some of the tutorials, but are not essential. For the sake of accessibility, the examples feature both GIMP 2 and Blender 2.73, which can be downloaded for free; however, you are free to use any equivalent app of your choice (such as Photoshop, Maya, or 3Ds Max).
This book is aimed at game artists who are interested in designing levels in Unity with no past programming experience and does not assume detailed knowledge of similar game platforms.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "You will find more Detail assets to help with level creation within the Chapter 3 | Details folder."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: " Right now it is empty, so let's add one to it by clicking on the New Project button at the top right corner."
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