Introduction
Throughout this blog post, I’ll be speaking about the lecture we had with Herman and how my experience went being introduced to Unity. This lecture aimed to show us animators the workflow between Maya and Unity, showing us how to import the work we produce in Maya into Unity. This was to help those who planned to work with game designers for the collaborative unit. I’ll also discuss my thoughts on the lecture and the software itself, highlighting the key elements that impacted me.
What did we do?
During this introduction to Unity, we went through a few of the fundamentals of the software and navigated through it to get ourselves familiar with it. Firstly, we learned how to import files into our project. I focused a lot on this section because I was confused and unsure about implementing objects from Maya into Unity before this. Even though I wasn’t required to use Unity for any of my current modules, I needed to figure out the workflow between the two software for my Collaborative unit. My group and I didn’t know how to export animations from Maya and import them into Unity. However, this part of the lecture fixed this concern and cleared things up for me.
Secondly, we learned how to place basic objects into our 3D world. It was slightly similar to how Maya operated; however, it wasn’t as complicated, in my opinion – Which I expected as the creators didn’t build the software for modelling purposes. Once we experimented with placing objects into our 3D world, we came out of the editing mode and began roaming around in the 3D world we had just built. I found this fun and was quite amazed at what I was doing. Even though I had just made the most basic 3D world game, it was my first experience creating an interactive game, which was great for me as I’ve been into gaming since I was a child.
Lastly, we learned a few control settings relating to the objects we imported from Maya. This was very useful as it gave me more guidance on how to animate my objects for the collaborative unit. For instance, we learned that we could repeat the animation of an object via Unity, meaning I wouldn’t need to repeat the same animation in Maya before exporting it. I simply would need to animate the object once and export it.
Evaluation
From this brief introduction to Unity, I have now included this software in the list of software tools I would like to learn in future. I really want to expand on the lessons I learned today and create a game of my own in the near future. Before this, I never really considered delving deep into the gaming industry with my animation skills. However, after this lecture, the door has surely opened up because I believe I can produce some great concepts for a game if I was to familiarise myself with the software furthermore. After finishing this course, I think I’ll work on a few indie games by myself, or with help, if I could get it, using my animation skills alongside the new set of skills I will strive to learn in Unity.