Book Image

Unity 2021 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By : Shaun Ferns
Book Image

Unity 2021 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By: Shaun Ferns

Overview of this book

If you are a Unity developer looking to explore the newest features of Unity 2021 and recipes for advanced challenges, then this fourth edition of Unity Cookbook is here to help you. With this cookbook, you’ll work through a wide variety of recipes that will help you use the essential features of the Unity game engine to their fullest potential. You familiarize yourself with shaders and Shader Graph before exploring animation features to enhance your skills in building games. As you progress, you will gain insights into Unity's latest editor, which will help you in laying out scenes, tweaking existing apps, and building custom tools for augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) experiences. The book will also guide you through many Unity C# gameplay scripting techniques, teaching you how to communicate with database-driven websites and process XML and JSON data files. By the end of this Unity book, you will have gained a comprehensive understanding of Unity game development and built your development skills. The easy-to-follow recipes will earn a permanent place on your bookshelf for reference and help you build better games that stay true to your vision.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Free Chapter
2
Responding to User Events for Interactive UIs
3
Inventory and Advanced UIs
6
2D Animation and Physics
13
Advanced Topics - Gizmos, Automated Testing, and More
15
Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR)

Converting and importing 3D models into a project

There are times where, to get the visual effect we want, we need a complex 3D object. One option is to create our own using the ProBuilder modeling tools built into Unity, which we will explore later in the Creating geometry with ProBuilder recipe. However, another option is to use a 3D model that's been created by a third party. The Unity Asset Store is just one source for models, and they are already prepared for importing into Unity as  FBX models or even Unity Prefabs. However, there are thousands of free 3D models available online that have been made with third-party 3D modeling applications, and all we need to do is open them in their applications and export them as FBX models, ready to be imported into Unity.

In this recipe, we'll convert a free 3D model of some pumpkin Jack-o'lanterns and other items into an .fbx file, which we can then import and use in a Unity project:

Figure...