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!
Related
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
I want to do some test with the AR in Unity, so my idea is to use the ground plane detection of the arcore to instantiate a ring. The ring is made of segments and I want to use an obstacle between the camera and some segment to hide these segments.
I have thought to use the slam to get the shape of the obstacle and use the coordinates to hide (disable or change shader/material) or not the segments behind the obstacle.
I do some researches about Vuforia and I know they use the slam but it does not seem that we can access the shape directly from Vuforia so I thought to use the arcore directly. I think it may be done with spatial mapping.
Because I am not very experienced I prefer to ask about the possibility to do it and if I am in the good way.
If I understand correctly, the term you are looking for should be "Occlusion Management". Vuforia. There is a sample package in the asset store, but I don't know how much value it can offer to your cause. Look here
You could as well take a manual approach and integrate your obstacle as Image- or Model-Target, so that you can simply use a virtual replica of your obstacle that hides everything behind it. This however means that your obstacle would have to be always the same object, so I am not sure if this approach is suited for your needs. But this would be the easiest and cleanest way imho.
You can find many tips to get around occlusion problems here
Imagine a large free-roam game in Unity,
The yellow size indicates about the largest you can make a typical Terrain in Unity.
Art dept. will completely build, meter by meter, the entire scene.
Please note, this has absolutely no connection to repeating scenery (as in runners) or procedural scenery (as in say some race games).
Really, what is the correct and good way to do this in Unity?
use say 50 or so terrains, each perhaps 100m x 100m ?
can you even have or use that many terrains?
or what?
For anyone googling here.
The correct solution is indeed
Terrain stitching
that's it.
In practice you must use one of the tools available to do this (eg, TerrainFormer) or, your team will write from scratch a terrain stitcher.
Yes, you just use "many terrains".
The best approach to the exact problem posed,
is in fact to just:
"use lots of Terrains".
It seems to be perfectly viable in Unity to have many (dozens) of Terrain units, basically "sitting next to each other".
In practice, you'll need TerrainFormer
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/terrain/terrain-former-20052
or one of the similar tools.
(Or, I suppose, from scratch write your own tool to stitch terrains, and allow you manipulate them all at once, join the edge-heights perfectly, etc etc.)
It's not realistically possible to just perfectly sit many Terrains together (by hand), matching all the edges, etc etc. So you're going to need a "stitcher" package for putting many Terrain squares together.
So, this huge area ..
has about 12 Terrain.
So that's the answer, you can indeed have "many, many" Terrain in a Unity project, you do indeed essentially just "sit them next to each other". In practice it's not achievable unless you use one of the editor tools such as TerrainFormer.
The proper way to do this would have been with procedural mesh generation with MeshFilter and Mesh API but you mentioned that this not at all random or generative so that one is eliminated.
It's just simply a very long, thin, hand-made environment
The best way in this case would be a Modular Level Design. You need to create Modular Assets. With this you can have a long road in pieces which can be tileable. A good modeling artist should be able to create and texture modular assets with 3D modeling packages like Blender, Maya or 3ds Max.
All the programmer has to do is make each asset a prefab then use the Instantiate function to instantiate them to create any distance of environment. You can also create a static environment in the scene from the Editor. Almost anything can be made into a modular Asset especially buildings and roads.
After assembling them in Unity, you can do static batch on all the instantiated modular parts with Unity's StaticBatchingUtility.Combine to improve performance of the game since they are not being moved.
Below is an example of a modular road asset that can be used to create almost any amount of road:
You already answered your question
in this case would it be better to not bother with Unity's otherwise excellent Terrain, and the modellers would just outright build the long course/scenery? (Obviously you'd have to chunk it so it all occludes fine)
I think it's the way to go. If the performance is an issue, try putting each chunk in different scenes and then have a master scene to load them async and additively. And of course you want to unload each scene as it becomes invisible in the camera.
I personally go with your own solution which is letting the Unity Occlusion Culling system to take care of the hiding and showing chunks. I only go with the separate scenes approach if I'm not getting enough performance this way.
I recently had the same problem. We build a tilebased infinite runner with road crossings. The camera was positioned behind and over the car looking down on the street and the player car. So the setup is quite comparable.
We used Curvy from the Asset store to create paths for moving the player and also for creating the geometry of the streets and the surroundings among the streets.
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/level-design/curvy-splines-7038
It is also easy to spawn tiles with curvy paths and combine them at runtime. So you can separate long distances into smaller segments and spawn them randomly.
We also used QuickBrush from ProCore to quickly paint environment detail to the geometry like trees, bushes or stones. I think procore tools are now implemented in the new Unity 2018 version.
Worked quite well.
I have a 3D CAD file of a set of products. I want to create a viewer so that the user can freely rotate the object in 3D.
How would I best go about this?
1) I had thought about exporting a series of 360 degree images every 30 degrees around the image, but that would be around 360 images per product. Then right the code to handle the matrix that would be required to handle rotation of the object. Seems very excessive, but doable.
2) OpenGL - I have never done any 3d animation using this, though.
We are using LightWave 3D, if that helps.
I'd recommend going with the 3-D rendering route, even though it might require more upfront work than the multiple sliced images approach. It will provide much greater flexibility over the long run, and I think you'll be able to generate a more pleasing experience in the end (small application binary size, smoother rotation, etc.). Also, once you have the display code done, you'll be able to pull in arbitrary models to add on to the ones you started with, and make tweaks to those models more easily.
This question points out a number of ways that you might be able to import LightWave models into formats usable by an OpenGL ES application. It looks like you'll probably need to pass through Blender or another intermediary to accomplish this.
Once you have the model in a form that you can work with, you can build off of several open source 3-D rendering applications for the iPhone / iPad, such as my Molecules application. My application is built for displaying 3-D molecular structures, but people have modified it to support rendering other models for their own needs, so I know that's possible. I go into detail on how this application works in the video for the OpenGL ES session of my class on iTunes U.
OpenGL ES may seem intimidating at first, but it only took me three weeks of nights-and-weekends development to build the initial version of Molecules, and I had no real OpenGL experience before starting that project. There are many great resources out there now, so it's easier than ever to get started.
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.