Explore Unity – Essentials of Real-time 3D
Continuing on the Essentials Pathway I chipped away at some more Unity learning. Mission 2: Explore Unity is made up of six different projects designed to explore the different roles and career paths available to a Unity creator and to focus on the skills necessary to create simple 2D and 3D projects that will develop an understanding of the Unity Editor.
Project 1, Real-time Creation, is about real-time creation and gives some history on the concept and describes why it is so useful in today’s world. More informative than a project, it essentially lays out what Unity is, what it can do, and who it is made for.
With Project 2, Essentials of Real-time 3D, you actually get your hands on Unity and learn the basics of creating new 3D objects, interacting with them, and controlling their properties and behaviors. You learn how to create and apply materials to a 3D object, adjust the lighting of a scene, and find and import 3D assets from the Unity Asset Store. One of the best things learned from this project is how to manage GameObjects with prefabs, prefab variants, and nested prefabs. These are particularly useful because they allow you to create many instances of a GameObject and alter them all on a singular level instead of having to change each object individually. A real time-saver for projects with a lot of similar objects.
To put all these lessons into practice, the project ends with a challenge assignment called The Floor is Lava. In this challenge, you are tasked with creating a track for a 3D ball to roll upon and reach an end goal without falling off and hitting the floor. This requires you to utilize all the skills you’ve learned up to this point and pretty much leaves your design up to your own interpretation of the assignment. In my case, I built three ramps that all angle in different directions so that I could use the rolling ball’s inertia to guide it along the intended path. The ball ends up in a small catch container I built. I then applied materials to all my objects to jazz things up and finished by making the floor look like lava, of course. It is the name of the challenge.
When you are finished designing and building your challenge level, you are then guided in how to build your project, as a WebGL (HTML 5) project in this case. Once the project is built as a playable “game”, you then learn how to publish it to the Unity website where it can be played by others on Unity Play. My project, called Rolling Ball Demo, can be seen by clicking on the link.
