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Making Images in GIMP Part Two

In the previous post about making images in GIMP, I went over the process of creating the composition and creating clean line art.  In this next part I will explain the steps I go through in coloring my picture, including flats, foreground, background, extra detail, and lighting. And let us continue! The next thing I did after making the line art was add a new layer on screen mode and filled it with an orangish-brown color.  This will tie the piece together in the end by giving all the colors a similar hue while they still pertain to their individuality.  The opacity of the screen is about 52% so that it's not too overwhelming.  Along with this I have brought down the line art layers to 80% opacity to give it a softer effect. Here you can clearly tell the palette I have chosen for this piece, it's going to be filled with earthy tones.  The flat colors for the foreground are fairly basic and cooperate with each other.  Don't be afraid to take your time, make

How To Instantiate Along A Grid (Simple City Generator Method)

A city created at run time that was instantiated along a grid. The reason for this post is to allow people to understand how to make something like this easy and simple. The city is instantiated along a grid using the restraints of the length and width perimeters passed through into the generator. Tiles are incremented through a constant that defines the width/length of the tile square. Here's the code I've constructed for the current explanation : var tileConstant:float = so and so number; var tileObject:GameObject; function BuildCity(desiredLength:int, desiredWidth:int){ var length:int=1; var width:int=1; while(length<=desiredLength){                 Instantiate(tileObject, Vector3(width*tileConstant,0,length*tileConstant), Quaternion.identity); //incrementing if(length ==(desiredLength)&&width <desiredWidth){ length = 1; width +=1; }else{ length+=1; } } } This code it a

Backing Up Your Projects

What Prompted This Post: Over the summer while working on one of my games, Unity 3D released an update which required your project to be "upgraded".It warned me to back up my project, but of course me being the stupid little high-school student I am, didn't even think twice and upgraded the project without any precautions. Upon the re opening of my Unity project, I was in shock. Where as the skeletons for all my prefabs, models, and materials still existed, they were all out of place and not put together. So a prefab of a enemy had the mesh component, but the mesh was not linked to it to render, the material was not linked to be rendered. The attached script was said to be missing (although still existed within my project, just not linked). This existed not only in prefabs but every game object in every scene. I was never able to get back my terrain (although height maps existed) so I had to end up remaking it. The whole process of linking everything back together took

Optimization Tip #1 - Windows As Textures

A lot of games back before the super consoles of PS3 or the XBox 360, companies had to go to extra lengths to save on faces to boost the performance. Technology throughout the past 10 years has grown tremendously advanced for such a short period of time. We are though, still not to the point of having the ability to run the graphics of a PS3's prestige on an everyday tablet and not have major issues. All developers have to optimize their games of course, especially those who are developing for android or IOS. One way everyone has seen is UV mapping entire buildings with a texture. Doors and windows are flat and look like some one cut pictures out of a magazine and glued them on a cardboard box as part of an art project. Now I'm not denouncing the method, its actually kind of crazy to think of trying to model a building in crazy detail. A lot of what makes a realistic looking model is the detail of the texture, instead of the complexity of the it's mesh. Big games like Ca

Making Images in GIMP Part One

This is a little off our usual topic, but still an important factor for games.  When you walk into a game store and you're looking for no game in particular except for one that looks cool, you can't judge it off of game play, you have to go by the cover (and the description on the back of a game).  And so, I shall show you the basics of making an image in GIMP. NOTE OF WARNING:  GIMP was not made primarily as a drawing tool, it was made for image manipulation, so while it has many of the same features that Photoshop has, it does not have everything.

Importing Models and Animation From Blender

NOTE - If nothing is showing up in your preview section, then you have exported the model wrong. Remember you need to have selected in Blender what to be exported. If you have done this, try reversing the faces in the model and re exporting. So after you have your model from Blender rigged , animated , and exported, you can bring it in to the unity editor.  Scale factor is by default 0.01, to change that, try looking at this link .  Anyways, your going to want to drag you model to your scene and adjust the scale factor till you have the desired size (scale factor 1 is rarely what you ever want it, its huge). To start defining your animation, click the + button that's highlighted purple in the picture. You'll get something like this where you can name your animation, define starting and ending frames, and wrap mode. Remember back when you were making the animation for your model? you had to define frames and you had a certain amount of frames in your overall anima

Animation Basics on Blender 2.57; Walking Cycle

Now for animation.  And I want to apologize for constantly changing the models I use for tutorials, I don't really have an excuse, I'll try to make this the last time I do it.  For this introduction to animation I'll be using a honey badger model, already rigged .  So, on that note, let us begin. Here is the honey badger, rigged and ready to be animated. Truth be told, basic animations are not all that hard to accomplish as long as you know what to and not to select.  In order to start animating, click on the armature and go into pose mode, here you can edit the position of each armature and the vertices assigned to them freely.  Animation in Blender is based on and made simplified by a key frame system, making the animation process easy and the finished product smooth.  Now to actually conducting an animation. Although you can manually put in keyframes, I prefer using the automatic keyframe setting, which can be enabled by selecting the two buttons which are circ

Making Characters: Rigging in Blender 2.57

I suppose this could be considered a continuation off of here , only I'm using a different model.  I've found people do rigging different ways, but the most effective way I've found is like this.

How To Import and Use Fonts

-Made by Chrome Fx Films To use different fonts in your game, your going to have to acquire some fonts. You can go somewhere like 1001 free fonts  and download ones you like and want to use. When you download the file, you'll need to extract the file if its in  a .zip The text file should have the extension .ttf. If you text files have a FFIL extension, simply rename the font file (yourname.ttf). Drag the text file into unity to import. By default the Character variable should be labeled Dynamic . The Dynamic setting means  that Unity won't pre-generate the texture, so if you look at your material containing your font, It probably will be blank. (read more here) Now your over all objective should be getting your font to look like this (unless you prefer dynamic): Where the characters of the font are not jumbled up and visible. Now usually all you have to do to achieve this is change the  Character  variable from  Dynamic  to Unicode .

How To Make a Hellish Looking Sky Box

I came across this problem while constructing my scene of Hell in a little project I've been working on, and could not find a reasonable sky box on the web for what I want. Maybe I was not looking hard enough, but I ended up making nice substitute. If you think the sky box looks familiar, then your right. The Sky box I'm using is already packaged with Unity3D! To import the sky boxes Unity has made for you,  simply go to Assets>Import Package>Skyboxes.  The sky boxes will appear in your projects tab under a folder named "Standard Assets". To make this sky box, first you must find the folder containing all the sky box materials and open it up. In it will be a list of sky boxes for your disposal. To get this skybox, I decided to tweak the "StarryNight Skybox" (But the "MoonShine Skybox" looks pretty cool also!).  Select the sky box and view it under the inspector tab. Underneath the properties there will be a tint color variable allowin

How Do You Make a Skybox in Unity3D?

So we have a nice hellish looking scene in our Unity 3D game, and our default blue background really doesn't belong here   You can change the color of the background.. Or you could add a skybox for more detail and awe your players with the scenery. An example of our Scene with a skybox : So, you may be asking your self  "How do I Make a Skybox ?" .  Before I begin, Unity has already created many nice presets for everyone's use. You can simply go to  Assets>Import Package>Skyboxes. The skyboxes will appear in your projects tab under a folder named "Standard Assets". So to begin with making your own Skybox, you should start out making a new material in your projects tab Now change your new material's shader properties from diffuse to RenderFX>Skybox You material should now show 6 slots(up, down, left, right, front and back) in which to put your textures in to build your skybox like so, Now you simply a

Making a character model Blender 2.57 Part one

New tutorial on another way on making a character.  For reference, I'll be doing this from right-ortho perspective, which you can switch to by pressing 3 on a numberpad, or if you have an emulated numberpad, the 3  on the number row. So, you start out with your basic cube, go into edit mode and subdivide it.  Press Z to change it to wireframe mode and select the bottom half and the quarter to the right and delete it.  You should be left with a rectangular prism with a missing bottom and side.  You can fix this by selecting two adjacent edges then pressing F which will join the two edges together with a face, or you can leave it hollow. The next part is mirroring the object.  Select the object and go to modifiers.  Since I'm doing the object from right-ortho, I will make it so it mirrors on the y axis, and y axis only.  Under options, check merge, clippings, and vertex groups.  This makes sure that the object mirrors correctly and also while you are modeling it doesn't m