Mind-Melding Unity and Blender for 3D Game Development

Spencer Grey

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781801076913
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Computergraphiken

Add Blender to your Unity game development projects to unlock new possibilities and decrease your dependency on third-party creatorsKey Features• Discover how you can enhance your games with Blender• Learn how to implement Blender in real-world scenarios• Create new or modify existing assets in Blender and import them into your Unity gameBook DescriptionBlender is an incredibly powerful, free computer graphics program that provides a world-class, open-source graphics toolset for creating amazing assets in 3D. With Mind-Melding Unity and Blender for 3D Game Development, you'll discover how adding Blender to Unity can help you unlock unlimited new possibilities and reduce your reliance on third parties for creating your game assets. This game development book will broaden your knowledge of Unity and help you to get to grips with Blender's core capabilities for enhancing your games. You'll become familiar with creating new assets and modifying existing assets in Blender as the book shows you how to use the Asset Store and Package Manager to download assets in Unity and then export them to Blender for modification. You'll also learn how to modify existing and create new sci-fi-themed assets for a minigame project. As you advance, the book will guide you through creating 3D model props, scenery, and characters and demonstrate UV mapping and texturing. Additionally, you'll get hands-on with rigging, animation, and C# scripting. By the end of this Unity book, you'll have developed a simple yet exciting mini game with audio and visual effects, and a GUI. More importantly, you'll be ready to apply everything you've learned to your Unity game projects.What you will learn• Transform your imagination into 3D scenery, props, and characters using Blender• Get to grips with UV unwrapping and texture models in Blender• Understand how to rig and animate models in Blender• Animate and script models in Unity for top-down, FPS, and other types of games• Find out how you can roundtrip custom assets from Blender to Unity and back• Become familiar with the basics of ProBuilder, Timeline, and Cinemachine in UnityWho this book is forThis book is for game developers looking to add more skills to their arsenal by learning Blender from the ground up. Beginner-level Unity scene and scripting skills are necessary to get started.

Section 1: There and Back Again – An Asset Roundtrip with Unity and Blender

In a very speedy excursion, we export an asset from Unity, import it into Blender, perform a simple modification, and then import it back into Unity.

This section comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Melding Unity and Blender 
• Chapter 2, Gathering Our Resources
• Chapter 3, Entering the Blender Zone for the First Time
• Chapter 4, Asset Assimilation: Returning to Unity

Chapter 1: Melding Unity and Blender

"The journey of 1,000 parsecs begins with a single thruster burn." – The AutoSage of Rigel VI

Hello, Earthling! How would you like unlimited cosmic power? That is essentially what you get when you use the ultra-versatile Unity game engine in combination with the awesome assets you can create with the Blender graphics toolkit. "Wait a minute," you say with worry, "that much power sounds expensive." Well, worry not! All that power can be had for the low, low price of… nothing!

(Full disclosure: if you start making more than $100,000 a year with Unity, you need to start paying a licensing fee. You should be so unlucky!)

This book starts you on the path to that unlimited power. Once begun, it is a never-ending journey bounded only by your effort and imagination. Unity and Blender go together like some of the most famous human combinations:

• Peanut butter and jelly
• Pen and paper
• Thelma and Louise

On our journey, we will learn how to create, alter, texture, animate, and script 3D objects in Unity and Blender and exchange them between the two programs in our pursuit of making breath-taking, mind-altering, fun-inducing, superlative-worthy video games.

This chapter lays the groundwork for what lies ahead. We will cover the following:

• What is Unity and why choose it?
• What is Blender and why choose it?
• What software, hardware, and knowledge should you have to make this journey?

What is Unity?

Unity is a paradox. It is a video game engine that is not a video game engine, or rather, it is so much more than that.

Firstly, what's a video game engine? Aww, come on. Are you really reading this book and asking that? Okay, you are forgiven. Maybe you are recovering from a mind-wipe. A video game engine is a software tool that helps you to create a video game. One example of an incredibly famous video game engine would be… Unity!

Unity was first released in 2005. It was available only on Mac and could only publish games for Mac. That very quickly changed and now, over a decade later, Unity is a mature and capable (though not yet sentient) piece of software. Unity is available for use on Windows, macOS, and Linux. As of this writing, Unity can create 3D and 2D games for more than 25 different platforms! These platforms include Windows, macOS, and Linux as well as WebGL, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, various virtual reality and augmented reality platforms, and more!

Here is an example of a made-in-Unity, first-person-shooter:

Fig. 1.1 – Escape from Tarkov. Developer: Battlestate Games

And here is an example of a retro 2D arcade game:

Fig. 1.2 – Cup Head. Developer: Studio MDHR

When I say Unity can "create games," I don't actually mean it can only "create games." That's just the tip of the planetoid. Unity is currently used to create many different kinds of experiences in areas and industries besides video games, including the fields of virtual/augmented/extended reality (VR/AR/XR), simulation, real-time cinema, film pre-visualization, and automotive design and marketing. Oh yeah, let's not leave out construction, architecture, art installations, engineering, and research data visualization. Got all that? For those of you sitting in the back, there may be a pop quiz later.

Now, it's true that there are other powerful game engines out there, such as Unreal, Godot, and so on. So why should Unity be your go-to game engine of choice?

Top 12 Reasons for Using Unity

These are the top reasons for using Unity as your game engine of choice:

1. Versatility: If you can dream it, you can build it, all the way up to AAA titles. Unity has an amazing toolset that allows you to create 2D and 3D games ranging from the very simple to the very complex. It can be your go-to choice whether you are re-making Pong or creating the next best MMORPG.
2. Ease of Learning: To be clear, Unity development can get very complex. But to get started with Unity and produce something surprisingly fun and advanced can take as little as 15 minutes. And Unity caters to different learning styles, with visual scripting available for those who prefer that to code editing.
3. Portability: With little to no modification, you can get your latest masterpiece running on a number of the many platforms Unity supports, including desktop, web, mobile, and XR!
4. Community: You are not alone. Unity has a development community of over 1.5 million people. You read that right, 1.5 million humans. Of course, that is insignificant on a galactic scale, but from your limited perspective, it is quite impressive. This means that if you run into a problem or need advice, the answers are out there in cyberspace. The Unity developer community is very friendly and encouraging as well.
5. Learning support: Unity has excellent documentation as well as an extensive, dedicated, free learning site: https://learn.unity.com. This is not to mention the hundreds of high-quality tutorial videos on YouTube as well as the many excellent how-to books available (such as this one!).
6. Customizability: Every developer and every project is different. The Unity editor is tremendously configurable and even programmable. You can create in-editor custom tools to make working on your specific game much easier. And if you need a certain special visual quality for your game? Even the rendering pipeline Unity uses for graphics is programmable and customizable.
7. Price: Free! Did I mention that already? You only need to start paying a fee if your games start making gobs of money. Gobs.
8. Reach: You have certainly played a Unity-made game before whether you knew it or not. As of the writing of this book, Unity games have reached over 500 million gamers and the Unity engine is responsible for creating 34% of free mobile games on the market. Unity games reach every game market there is.
9. Assets: 3D models, 2D art, visual effects, sound effects, GUIs, tools, templates, and much more. Back in the bad old days of game development, there were some powerful game engines and development technologies available (anyone remember Microsoft's XNA?) but, as an indie developer or hobbyist, there was nothing to put into your game unless you created it yourself or paid (or mind-controlled) a talented artist. It cannot be overstated how valuab...