Hi there. Today is day 25 of my 60 day challenge to become a Unity Game Developer!
I started the new Cinematography course and WHOA! It is so neat to see how all of these beautiful individual pieces of art come together to create a game! I definitely feel like I’m on a whole new level with this one.
Seriously, look how gorgeous this is:
Some things I learned:
Got a chance to explore the wide world of materials, mesh renderer, sub mesh renderers, shaders, and textures. All of these are tools used to help create the “look” of the objects you see in the game. There are things like setting the color via albedo, adding a metallic shine, and setting tiles just to name a few.
From the docs:
Meshes are the main graphics primitive of Unity. They define the shape of an object.
Materials define how a surface should be rendered, by including references to the Textures it uses, tiling information, Color tints and more. The available options for a Material depend on which Shader the Material is using.
Shaders are small scripts that contain the mathematical calculations and algorithms for calculating the Color of each pixel rendered, based on the lighting input and the Material configuration.
Textures are bitmap images. A Material can contain references to textures, so that the Material’s Shader can use the textures while calculating the surface color of a GameObject.
In addition to basic Color (Albedo) of a GameObject’s surface, Textures can represent many other aspects of a Material’s surface such as its reflectivity or roughness.
- Learned the difference between light probes and a reflection probe as well as the appropriate times to use them. Light probe is more dynamic and allows to create much better visual results but it is expensive. Reflective probe does the job albeit not as well but could be a good solution when you need something lightweight such as when creating a mobile application.
- Learned how occlusion is used to create false shadows as well as how to create a skybox.
- Created my first cutscene! Through this I learned the difference between actors and game assets. Actors are used specifically for cutscenes which are the animations that you see pop up in games, usually with a story line. Check this out!
Challenges today :
- Trying to be ok with feeling like I should be farther along.
I am super duper excited to keep working on this new project. Maybe I’m just a sucker for new shiny things but whatever the reason I’m even more pumped than usual to get back into it tomorrow where I will be diving deeper into the key features/workflows of timeline and cinemachine.
Good night.
