I've started learning gaming development using Unity and there's a thing I wasn't able to fully understand. I stumbled across the Sketch Fab website and noticed this cool market with 3D models and I was wondering what are the requirements to import such a model into an actual game.
For example this one already has animations:
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/royal-knight-895d1c1d222d4efd9f264318e8ab0cb2
But on the other hand others don't have:
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/crusader-knight-b079a8e34f454836bc8107c21c8c47fe
I have basically 2 questions:
If I buy the first model is this going to save me a lot of time and I can jump straight into implementing the character into an actual game and add custom scripts to it etc?
If I buy the second one, what would I need to too to actually animate this character? Is this something that somehow I can learn from Unity tutorials or would I need to import it to a tool like Blender to further improve this model with animations?
This question provokes a lot of answers. The first model you show does have a .fbx format and the animations will hopefully work fine. This format is typically what you want to use with Unity.
The second model is not Rigged (look at the product description). What this means is you will have to rig every bone yourself (in Blender) and make it compatible with Unity. I never buy a model that isn't rigged.
To add animations to the second character, you can download some from www.mixamo.com or use many of the animations you will find in the Unity Asset Store.
Personally, I prefer getting my models from www.turbosquid.com. You can search against multiple formats including .unitypackage
As Jiveturkey said, the first model is directly compatible with unity and doesn't require any additional steps - so if you're looking to focus solely on building the game without worrying about animation then you might want to go with the first model.
The second model isn't rigged, so you would have to manage all rigging and animating yourself - Unity does have a built-in rigging package, so you would be able to do that within unity rather than using Blender (Link to tutorial for rigging in Unity, Rigging tutorial directly from unity)
Unity can read .fbx, .dae (Collada), .3ds, .dxf, .obj, and .skp files for 3D models, and that's pretty much the only requirement. There are tons of sites with free 3D assets if you don't want to spend the money as well Itch.io, Unity Asset Store, and tons more - these are just the ones that come to mind
Related
I found a pack of unity assets (these 3D characters with built-in animations) that serves my purposes very well, but I want make slight feature changes to some of them. For example, I would want to change the color of some, maybe add a horn or other utensil, make the tail longer etc. I would like these changes to impact the animations minimally. I am wondering about what is the best workflow for this.
I looked into importing the .fbx files into Blender to make such featural changes, but the animations are not retained in Blender (this seems to inevitable according to some?). In general, most information is about workflows going from Blender to Unity, rather than the other way. I am thinking of importing the .fbx files into Blender regardless, without the animations, changing some features, and then importing back into Unity, hoping that the Unity animations can snap back onto the modified creature.
Since I am a beginner with both Unity and Blender, I wanted to check whether this is has a chance to work or whether there are better alternatives. Many thanks.
Unity animation if done using the main tool is probably just animating properties of the model/objects that are exposed to Unity's serialized interface, e.g. color, position, etc. So, either they animated the model hierarchy inside Unity (sounds unlikely), in which case the animation is part of an animation clip, or they did it in Blender, in which case the animation should be part of the fbx.
You can try an application like Fbx Review to view the fbx file and see if it includes the animation.
Unity Animation
Unity binds its animation streams with Transform/GameObject names. As long as you don't modify the hierarchy of the model, you should be able to modify it in blender like you want and later import into Unity.
Fbx Animation
Simply import into Blender, and make any changes that don't break the animations.
Alternative
If you really must, you can modify the imported mesh inside the Unity Editor. There's a few tools available for this in the assetstore.
Last Bet
Simply email the asset seller and ask them what the best way to proceed would be. For a 150$, they will probably be willing to provide this amount of support.
Hey I have a simple question which I am having trouble finding any info about it online.
Situation: I am making an island explorer game.
In Blender i am creating my islands and all the static objects with the island (Trees, rocks, folliage, buildings, etc.) and exporting this island & static objects together in 1 FBX file. Then in Unity3d I have my scene already done I don't have to perform the scene creation there, i can focus on developing the interactable objects.
When I want to make a new island I just use the same project in Blender and re-use my previous works if I want to. Then export the new island to unity3d.
Is this correct? Am I supposed to "dress" my scene in Unity3d or in Blender? Does it make a difference (performance wise)
What I understand is that when I export multiple islands that are reusing the same tree for example, in Unity3D even though these trees are the same they are in different fbx's. But this only affects project size afaik?
It depends what you are making. Unity has a lot of tools, specifically environment creation tools that are much faster and more powerful to use in Unity rather than import from blender, especially for laying out a scene and prototyping.
Tools to check out:
ProBuilder (Asset Store)
PolyBrush (Asset Store Deprecated) :(
Terrain (Package Manager)
It is good that you are learning blender as for making characters / detailed objects its still the way to go.
Performance is based on verts / textures and won't matter if you make something in Unity or import from Blender.
I was wondering, what is the easiest way to create an animated 3D cartoon. I want to create a character which moves and talk. I am not familiar with an easy way to do it, I used Blender and Unity but I was wondering if there is an easy way to do it? as I believe that not everyone doing 3D cartons have to dig deep in coding, they certainly use a software/GUI or something to create it.
I am not sure what easy is defined for peole but someway might be easy for me , it may be hard for you. I think it is based on experience in the past.
If you want to create a custom 3d animated model, you need to model it first. Or you can find a 3d model which is similar to your model, so you can edit it. But you are going to use a 3d modeling programs like; Blender, 3ds Max, even SketchUp might work.
One easy way. Which requires less work
You can check Adobe Fuse. Which lets you select predefined parts and lets you create a 3d humanoid model. You can tweak them a bit. After completing you can export it to Mixamo where you can rig your model (also you can select premade models here). They have alot of animations to go. After selecting your animations you can import it to Unity.
Animation techniques
For most of them, you will need rigs. When you rigged a model, you can create animations with those rigs.
This is my one of the old works from university.(Ignore the music please :D) Before i make the animations, I've recorded myself on the exact angle with model, (Front and side 2 videos) and used my video as refence while animating. To conclude i used key frames. And Blender made the rest (making transaction between keyframes). This is one of the techniques.
--EDIT--
This might give you more information about the video referencing.
More budgeted projects mostly use mo-cap. Here is one example for facial animation.
There are also cheaper infrared cameras like Kinect which allows you to do mo-cap. But results are not that promising. You can find more than few assets in the Unity Store. But i suggest you to use at least 2 cameras if you choose this way.
There might be more ways to create 3d model animation. I am not an animator. But those are that i know.
Hope this helps! Cheers!
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I'm having issues being able to import a bone and skeletal animation from Maya to Blender to iPhone. Here's what I've done:
install the ColladaMaya plugin to export a DAE for Blender to export
used Jeff LeMarche's script to be able to export a single keyframe of the model and import this .h file into the iPhone game
Setup the GLView using more of Jeff LeMarche's steps and rendered into our Game, so this model display next to the actual game (not in 3D).
Researched oolongngine, sio2 (applied but haven't yet gotten e-mail back from them), other SO q's for solutions, including mine from game dev
Reviewed using FBX SDK content pipeline to dynamically generate class files for the animations.
I can import a model and display it. A lot of these processes respond to that issue and leaving the developer to manipulate the game object programmatically.
My main issue is finding the best, defined process of importing an animation into iphone next to the existing game? I don't need a whole game, or a whole scene, just one animating model and some steps to follow.
This animation is meant to play in a loop. There are 3 more animations that will play on different game states (good move, bad move, etc.). So I'm concerned that LeMarche's keyframe solution (which basically means exporting EVERY keyframe as a .h file) will be incredibly time-intensive and memory-intensive. I'm definitely willing to do it, but after all the research I've done (additional links not included), I'm lost as to where to go next besides hand-exporting each keyframe and importing them.
EDIT:
I've added a bounty to this for anyone who can give me a clearly-defined process for importing an animation from a 3D application into iPhone. NOT the entire application itself (i.e. Unity, Sio2, etc.), but just showing a 3D overlay in an application (like an animating model next to a bejeweled-esqe game, not interacting with the world.)
People keep saying, "create your own model loader". Are there scripts, examples, tutorials, anything that walks through this "model loader" process from EXPORTING from the 3D application (preferably Maya or Blender) and IMPORTING this animation and rendering it in Objective-C?
This is really a big problem with animation export. I had this problem recently and ended up with Assimp.
However it also has problems with skeletal animation exported from Maya and Blender. As for me I prefer 3Ds Max (don't forget to reset Xform before rigging), it has no problems with Collada and animation.
Though if you want to use that models in your game I suggest you to write your custom exporter for Maya or Blender. Also try the mesh (morph) animation. If you don't use inverse kinematics or something like that this is what you need.
I have written code that reads Blender files and parses the mesh, bone and animation data. It then applies the bone animations to the meshes world transforms etc. It's a lot of work, but certainly doable. If you have any questions about Blender peculiars, just ask me.
The other option is using a library like OgreKit, which can read blend files and does skeletal animation for you as well out of the box.
AnimKit is a small animation library that can read a .blend file and play an animation using Glut. It extracts all data for skeletal animation and more, including bones, mesh and animation channels etc from a Blender 2.5 .blend file.
AnimKit is open source (using the permissive zlib license) an you can check it out using Subversion:
svn co http://code.google.com/p/gamekit/source/browse/#svn%2Fbranches%2FAnimKit AnimKit
AnimKit doesn't run on iPhone yet, but I'll port it soon, using Oolong Engine.
Another interesting resource is Proton SDK (protonsdk.com) it has a customized Irrlicht SDK that runs on iPhone/Android etc. The RT3DApp sample can play an animation.
What is best software for creating models , textures etc... for iphone development.
From simplest to more complex programs.
First thing that comes to my mind is blender , but I'm curious what everybody else is using and their opinions.
Blender is a very good issue for your needs.
It's a very complete solution. Just take your time to learn it step by step. You'll get some great tutorials on the website.
Agreed! I found a tutorial about 3D programming mentioning Blender as a free tool. It was SO daunting to use at first, and I still haven't even figured out most of what it can do. However, I can now build and export the needed geometries for my applications.
Tips:
Use a 3 button mouse (RMB:Selects a vertice, edge or face; MMB Rotates the view camera)
'A' selects or deselects all
'X' deletes anything selected (prompts you first)
'B' Bounding Box Selection Mode
'E' Extrude selected things
For creating textures, I use Adobe's Illustrator, Photoshop and Fireworks, and then import the image into Blender. There is also a texture paint mode in Blender as well.
I tried Cheetah 3d , it looks decent and it exports directly to header files.
I will definitely try blender , but it seems overwhelming and i am not sure do i need to loose to much time on getting to know how to work in blender.
On other hand i was trying out cheetah 3d and i figured out most of the staff in couple of hours.