Tutorial 1 -- 3D Models

The first tutorial was about exporting models from blender and handling them in unity, we were tasked with exporting the barrel model we made (or using the pre-made sample if for some reason your own wasn't avaliable yet) from the .blend format blender uses into the much more common .fbx format.

My barrel model wasn't quite ready to be exported at this stage so I just used the sample one so that I could learn the processes that go into exporting from blender into unity. The process itself turned out to be quite simple on paper, just export as fbx, open that in unity and link the materials (but like all things on computers, I'm sure even that can go horribly wrong at any time it wants!), then I dragged the model into the scene view and boom!

The barrel has been placed in the scene! hooray! From there I setup an asset prefab for the barrel and dragged a few more barrels onto the scene with different transforms to test it out. Just for fun I set the barrels up to have some basic physics and collision when the game is started too :)

Finally the last task for the tutorial was to add some simple shapes like cubes or spheres to the scene and download some models online to add to the scene so that we're able to use online resources and don't have to make every single asset of our games in the event the time doesn't allow for it.

I found a simple model of the moon (made out of cheese, as wallace and gromit taught us all) and a much more complex car model to add to the scene. The moon turned out pretty well, but I think the car needs a bit more hand-refinement before it'd be properly ready to be used as an asset in-game, I also added some simple shapes that bounce around and interact with the barrels mostly because its fun to watch the phyics engine have them all interact :)

I didn't learn too much that I didn't already know, since I've used unity a fair few times before, though the I didn't know much about the details on properly importing models, materials and textures into unity before since most of my time spent in unity so far as been in 2D, so it was very interesting to learn a bit about how you'd go about setting that all up!