Substance Designer 2
Check out this Substance Designer 2 marketing video created by CreativeTD. It shows the power of Substance in your Unity projects. I’ve been using SD2 in my own projects and have to say it’s greatly improved workflow.
CameraMan 3.0 : Update #4
CM3 is coming along very nicely. Today, I worked on finishing up the motion cache implementation and finalizing the controls view UI.
The motion cache will be the new way to record keyframes in CM. Instead of relying on the -recordAttr command, I am creating my own system that will cache the motion when the user hits record. There is now a motion UI that you’ll use to send the recorded motion to Maya as well as save a motion file.
Video preview coming soon!
2012: Year of the modo
2012 has been slated by Luxology to the year of the modo and I have no doubts that it will be. modo has long been my go to application for 3D content creation. A major part that makes modo such a driving force is not only the cutting edge software, but the immense community of modonauts.
Lux has created a great and close knit community and I’m honored to be a part of it. Lux is a special kind of company as well. They recently conducted a sell/fundraiser and donated 60K dollars to Rett Syndrome! As a parent, who has a daughter with Rett, I was immensely touched by this kind gesture.
In the modcast, Brad mentions Lux turning 10 years. I remember back in 2002 when Lux was founded. The opened as a forum and operated as 3D community. I was a huge LightWaver at the time and was very curious to see what Lux was going to be. I remember constantly checking Luxology.net for latest news and updates two years before modo was released!
So here’s to Luxology and the year of the modo! Cheers my friends! Be sure to check out the latest modocast for modo news.
ZBrush Hard Surface Techniques: Edge Creasing
I’m working on creating a hard surface model in ZBrush for work. Over the past few days, I’ve been experimenting and research hard surface techniques. In this video, I show that Maya’s Edge Crease Tool will transfer edge weighing to ZBrush using GoZ. I am finding this technique to be much easier to work with over using ZBrush’s own crease option and a great technique for creating hard surface components.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get modo Edge Weights to transfer with GoZ. If anyone has been able to get Edge Weights to transfer, please let me know : )
Unity3D Flash in a Flash: Gear Box Walkthrough
I threw this video together covering the creation of my Unity 3D Flash in a Flash contest submission and I thought I’d share it on the blog. The video discusses light-probes and Substance materials.
CameraMan 3.0 Update
I’m still working away on CM3. Today I made some great progress on the app infrastructure. I’ve had many problems recording keyframes. In previous version, I had been using the recordAttr command and this has proved to be rather unreliable.
In CM3, I’ve implemented my own method for recording keyframes. Instead of recording the keyframes in realtime, which has never worked well over a network socket, I am caching the keyframes. Now, there is a Motion view, which gives you the ability to either save the keyframe cache to file or send the data over to Maya.
The new record feature allows you to record your movement, watch it happen in realtime in Maya’s veiwport and then when ready, save the motion to a file or send the cached keyframes to Maya’s timeline. This has proven to be much more efficient.
As soon as the cache system is complete, I’ll be seeding the build to beta testers. I’m planning on having another preview video soon.
Allegorithmic Bitmap2Material
I’ve been working with Substance Designer and Substances in my projects a lot lately and it’s proven to be a great asset and tool. Check out this video created by Allegorithmic on using Bitmap2Material. This video covers Maya, but B2M can also be used in Unity. I’ve used B2M and it’s an incredible time-saver on your projects.
Unity 3D Flash in a Flash: Gear Box Submitted
Well, I did it! I finished my project and just completed the submission process. I am working on a walk-through video for the entire project. I learned a lot by working on this project. All in all, I worked a little over a week on Gear Box. Now that it’s complete, I am going to begin the process of porting to iOS for deployment on the App Store.
As I said in my last post, this was an extremely rewarding project. It was great to work on something with no restrictions (other than a tight deadline) and no clients to worry about. The final day included last minute tweaks and setting up the webpage for submission.
Tools I used to create Gear Box
Luxology modo : 3D models and various texture painting
Allegorithmic Substance Designer: Used to create all textures
Apple Sound Track Pro: Used to loop and fix gear sound FX
NGUI UI Kit: Used to create start screen
Glyph Designer: Used to create a Font atlas
and of course…. Unity 3D 3.5 Public Beta. Thanks Unity for creating such great software and for this contest.
Best of luck to all of the other devs who have been working on projects for Flash in a Flash! I’ve spoken with several other developers during the process and it was great to talk with and help each other out with questions and bugs.
Gear Box: Unity 3D Flash in a Flash Submission update
I am now 24 hours away from the Flash in a Flash deadline. At this point, I will have a project to submit. All that’s left is to add a start button and spruce up the html page.
Tonight, I had a pretty big audio issue. I had an audio clip that would sound fine when I used “PlayOnAwake” but would sound highly compressed when I used Audio.Play to trigger the sound. It didn’t make much sense, but in the end, I used PlayOnAwake with the volume set to 0. When I wanted to play the sound, I just coded the volume to 1. Issues like that is what ironically helped to make this project so fun. Having to think quickly and make decisions as the timer was running out.
I’m so glad that I decided to participate in this contest. I highly doubt I’m going to win or place in the contest. However, that was never really my intention. I wanted to use this contest as a personal goal. A goal to see an idea from concept to completion and have a ton of fun working on something for myself. Something that didn’t matter if it was completed or not. There was no client. It was just me doing what I wanted to do and under my own restrictions and time. Creative freedom. Working on this project over the past week has also helped me to get up to speed with Unity 3.5 very quickly. It was like a shot of learning adrenaline.
This was such a positive experience and a great start to 2012! Tomorrow night, I’ll post my entry and will create walkthrough videos of my process.
Unity 3D Flash in a Flash: Submission Update
Well, I’m still working away on my submission when I get a chance. I’ve been pretty off and on. I am doing this more for fun and personal learning. There have been so many awesome entries, I pretty much don’t stand a chance. I’ve really enjoyed playing around with my idea and it’s been fun trying to get an idea completed under such a tight timeframe. I’ve been forced to think on my feet and make creative decisions much faster than I would normally. It’s been really good for me and I’ve learned a lot in regards to creative decision making and brainstorming.
At this point, I had an issue with the realtime shadows and Flash output, so I’ve decided to go with lightmapping and light-probes. I finally figured out how the light probes work in 3.5 and they’re pretty awesome!
In this project, I’ve made extensive use of Substance Designer for my textures. I created a specific rusted metal surface that would allow me to interactively make changes to the gear surfaces and add randomness to each object. However, I had an issue with the Substance Material working in Unity 3.5, so I had to take my metal Substance and bake it to bitmaps using Substance Player. This was unfortunate as I lost my flexibility, but using the nodal compositing of Substance Designer still proved to be a more robust method of creating my texture versus hand painting textures.
I’m so amazed by Substance Designer and the role Substances play in texturing. My metal substance allowed me to add dirt, rust and swap decals for each gear. After creating the substance, I then have total freedom in Unity to create unique copies of the metal texture using my Substance Material.
When my project is finished, I’ll put together a full tutorial or walkthrough of my process. Stay tuned!