Mini-review & Competition: Creating 3d Game Art for the iPhone with Unity

Featuring modo and Blender pipelines

Revolutionize your iPhone and iPad game development with Unity iOS, a fully integrated professional application and powerful game engine, which is quickly becoming the best solution for creating visually stunning games for Apple's iDevices easier, and more fun for artists.

Overview

About the book:

From concept to completion you'll learn to create and animate using modo and Blender as well as creating a full level utilizing the powerful toolset in Unity iOS as it specifically relates to iPhone and iPad game development.

Follow the creation of "Tater," a character from the author's personal game project "Dead Bang," as he's used to explain vital aspects of game development and content creation for the iOS platform. Creating 3D Game Art for the iPhone focuses on the key principles of game design and development by covering in-depth, the iDevice hardware in conjunction with Unity iOS and how it relates to creating optimized game assets for the iDevices.

Featuring Luxology's artist-friendly modo, and Blender, the free open-source 3D app, along side Unity iOS, optimize your game assets for the latest iDevices including iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad and the iPod Touch. Learn to model characters and environment assets, texture, animate skinned characters and apply advanced lightmapping techniques using Beast in Unity iOS.

In a clear, motivating, and entertaining style, Wes McDermott offers captivating 3D imagery, real-world observation, and valuable tips and tricks all in one place - this book is an invaluable resource for any digital artist working to create games for the iPhone and iPad using Unity iOS.

Competition:

Our friends from Focal Press are giving away 5 free books. All you need to do, to enter the competition is to send us your name, post address and phone number (required for international shipping) to our e-mail, before Tuesday the 13th of September 2011.

Table Of Contents

Chapter 1

  • Getting to know the iDevice Hardware and Unity Working as a 3D artist
  • iDevice Hardware
  • ARM CPU
  • Draw Calls
  • Batching
  • Dynamic Batching
  • Static Batching
  • GPU
  • Screen Resolutions
  • Fillrate Limited
  • Tile-Based Rendering
  • RAM
  • OpenGL ES
  • Fixed-Function Pipeline
  • Fully Programmable Pipeline
  • Texturing
  • Texture Units
  • Alpha Operations
  • Determining Your Game Budget
  • Frame Rate Budget
  • Rendering Budget
  • Vertex Budget
  • Texture Budget
  • It All Sums Up
  • Summary

Chapter 2

  • Planning the Vertex Budget
  • Testing Performance
  • Creating a Performance Test Scene
  • Targeting Devices
  • Sizing Things Up
  • What is a Game Unit
  • Setting Up modo
  • Importing into Unity
  • True Vertex Count
  • Degenerate Triangles
  • Smoothing Angles
  • UV Seams
  • Using Lights
  • Modeling Tater and Thumper
  • My Workflow
  • Creating Geometry
  • Reducing Geometry
  • Polygon Flow and Spin Quads
  • Merging Polygons and Removing Edge
  • Summary

Chapter 3

  • Understanding Textures and UV Maps
  • Creating UV Maps
  • Planning Your UV Maps
  • Creating UVs for Tater
  • Creating UVs for Thumper
  • Fundamentals of Game Textures
  • Texture Formats
  • Texture Size
  • Power of 2 (POT) and Non-Power of 2 (NPOT)
  • Texture Compression - PVRTC
  • Using Mip maps
  • Multiple Resolutions
  • Texture Budget
  • Creating the Diffuse Map
  • Faking Light and Shadow
  • Unity 3 OpenGL ES 2.0 Shaders
  • Texturing Tater
  • Reference Images
  • Skin Textures
  • Building Up Volume Through Shading
  • Creating Hair
  • Adding Some Wear and Tear
  • Summary

Chapter 4

  • Creating Game Objects using modo - Part Two: Training Trash Yard
  • Level Design
  • Creating a Style
  • What can reasonably be accomplished?
  • Breaking Down into Sections
  • Puzzle Building
  • Lazy Loading
  • Optimize Batching and Rendering
  • Batching Revisited
  • Creating the Level
  • Determining the Vertex Count
  • Further Testing
  • Using Texture Atlas
  • Building on the Grid
  • Does it make sense to use the grid?
  • Determining Working Texture Size
  • Creating the Ground
  • Creating the Walls
  • Creating the Props
  • Creating a Skybox
  • Creating the Trash Heap
  • Texturing the Level
  • Measuring the Scene
  • Creating the Textures
  • Creating UVs
  • Lightmap UVS
  • Summary

Chapter 5

  • Animation using Blender - Part One: Rigging Tater
  • Matching Object Size
  • Unity Blender Support and FBX Workflow
  • Using FBX
  • Understanding Skinned Meshes within Unity
  • VFP Optimized Skinning
  • Optimized Skinning Paths
  • Rigging Tater in Blender
  • iPhone and iPad Rigging Essentials
  • Creating the Basic Skeleton
  • Adjusting Bone Rotations
  • Fixing the Pelvis Bone for Hip Sway
  • Disabling Inherit Rotation
  • Weight Painting
  • Summary

Chapter 6

  • Animation using Blender - Part Two: IK and Basic Animation
  • Completing the Rig: Adding IK
  • Setting up IK for Legs
  • Setting up IK for Arms
  • Tiding Things Up
  • Fixing Rotations
  • Creating a Master Control
  • Using Bone Layers
  • Tweaking Weight Maps
  • Animating Tater
  • Using FBX
  • Multiple Clips per File VS One Clip per File
  • Option One: Multiple Clips
  • Option Two: One Clip
  • How Animation Data Works in Unity
  • Names Are Match to Relative Animation Component
  • Animating in Blender
  • Using Actions
  • Creating an Animation Cycle
  • Exporting the FBX
  • Make sure frame range is set correctly
  • Baking Keys
  • Disable Optimize Keyframes and Selected Objects
  • Summary

Chapter 7

  • Animation using Blender - Part Three: Advanced Animation
  • Unity's Animation System
  • Route One
  • Route Two
  • Creating Animations using Blender's NLA Editor
  • Animating Weapons
  • Using the NLA Editor
  • Blending Animations in Unity
  • Animation Layers
  • Additive Blending
  • Using Dynamics in Blender to Animate Objects
  • Setting Up Rigid Body Dynamics in Blender
  • Importing into Blender
  • Setting Up the Logic
  • Baking the Simulation
  • Editing the Animation with the NLA Editor
  • Summary

Chapter 8

  • Creating Lightmaps using Beast
  • Beast Lightmapping
  • Beast and HDR
  • Correct Lightmap UVs
  • Auto-Generate UVs
  • The Process
  • Using Dual Lightmaps
  • Beast Settings
  • Beast Custom Settings
  • Adjusting Lightmaps
  • Color Grading Maps
  • Adding Grime to Maps
  • Summary

Chapter 9

  • Working with Game Assets in Unity
  • Prefabs
  • Creating Prefab for Environment Props
  • Target Prefab
  • Camera Control Kit
  • Setting Up Colliders
  • Texture Compression
  • Mip maps
  • Optimized Shaders
  • Using Physics in Unity
  • Setting Up the Target Object
  • Adding Particles
  • Optimizing Physics using the Time Manager
  • Publishing your Game
  • Player Settings
  • Universal Builds
  • Optimizing your Game
  • Tuning Main Loop Performance
  • Tuning accelerometer processing frequency
  • Internal Profiler
  • Summary

Rob Nijkamp

Rob NijkampHi, I am Rob and proudly introduce myself as the Marketing manager of Dynamic Zones International BV.

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