Digital - Tutors - Using Texture to Enhance Digital Paintings in Photoshop CS5
1 hrs. 32 min. | December 23, 2011 | Photoshop CS5 | Author: Eddie Russell

 

In this tutorial we will learn several different techniques for adding texture to our digital paintings in Photoshop. Texture and surface detail is one area that is often overlooked by digital painters. By strategically implementing texture in your digital paintings, you can not only raise the quality of the image but also the level of realism. With this course we’ll get started by diving into Photoshop’s brushes. We’ll learn how we can create and configure our own custom brushes to paint texture. From here we’ll learn how to create our own patterns and several of the areas where these patterns can be utilized. Next we’ll look at some ways that we can bring images into our paintings, layering them over areas to create texture with the help of blend modes. Finally, we’ll learn a few methods of making our two dimensional textures appear to wrap around the three dimensional forms of our painting. After completing this course, you’ll be well equipped to begin experimenting with texture in your own digital paintings.

 

In this ZBrush tutorial we will learn to use the Blend Shapes plugin for ZBrush 4. Blend shapes are a great way to quickly add expression to our characters or otherwise deform models based on our specific design. ZBrush is particularly adept at allowing us to create those target shapes. In this series of lessons we’ll learn how to use the Blend Shapes plug-in to quickly create and export blend shapes for use in Maya. We will begin by talking about the installation of the plug-in and then take a look at its simple interface. We will proceed to create an expression for our old man character and export it quickly to Maya. While there, we will look at how to access our new blend shapes and talk about the other data that will come through with the transfer. We will also talk about exporting multiple blend shapes to create expression libraries and we'll finish up by looking at how we can export shapes for multiple subtools. Once completed, you'll be able to start transferring your own blend shapes to Maya much more quickly and easily.

 

In this series of tutorials, we will teach you the techniques and steps used when creating the UVs and textures for the subway level used throughout our Unity Mobile Game Development series. We will start by talking about some steps for starting your UV layout process as well as some important concepts that you should keep in mind whenever preparing your UVs and your textures for use inside of Unity. We will talk about the importance of hiding UV seams on your geometry, planning texture layouts on your objects to maximize efficiency, you will learn UV layout and geometry modification tricks that can dramatically enhance the use of your UV texture space, and we will spend time in Photoshop learning how the textures in our level were created.

 

In this tutorial we will learn about designing the user interface graphics for a game as well as how to prepare these graphics to bring into Unity. We’ll get started by discussing the needs of our game in terms of user interface graphics and then learn how to set up a document in Photoshop to design them in. Next we’ll learn some strategies for building graphics and examine some possible pitfalls. Moving on, we’ll learn about different states of a specific graphic and how we can setup our file to make saving this type of graphic out a bit easier. After all the graphics for our game have been created, we’ll shift our focus to preparing them for Unity. We’ll learn about important things to consider when cropping and saving our files. Then we’ll wrap this course up by learning how unity handles transparency and some workflows we will need to utilize to accommodate this. After going through this course, you will gain insight into the process of creating and saving user interface graphics for our mobile game.

 

In this series of tutorials, we will talk about the process we went through to create props and dress the level of our Unity Mobile Game Development project. We will start the training by taking a look at our game development document as well as the artwork that we have. These will give us a better idea of the technical aspects of our models and their look. We'll talk about building the geometry and creating texture maps for pieces of our level like old oil drums, boards and lights. We'll also cover workflows between Maya and Mudbox for modeling, sculpting, and painting bits of organic debris to illustrate the enemy infestation. We'll finish up by talking about dressing the set temporarily in Maya as a guide for the final dressing in Unity. This course goes over the process for creating props and set dressing and the thoughts behind the decisions but it is not a step-by-step tutorial. If you'd like to get up to speed on modeling in Maya, I'd recommend Introduction to Modeling in Maya which goes over the tools we use here in greater detail. If you want a more step-by-step look at creating assets in Mudbox, we have a variety of training available, including Introduction to Mudbox 2012 which will get you started very quickly. So over the next hour and a half or so, we'll talk about creating the pieces necessary to dress our set and give it a realistic, aged and worn look.

 

In this Unity tutorial, we’ll learn how to save data between play sessions with PlayerPrefs and create a highscore level for deployment to iOS or Android. Through these lessons we’ll learn how we can use the GUI class to draw various text and images on our screen. From there, we will examine time-saving techniques for placing our GUI elements with the inspector accurately. We'll learn how we can use arrays to store multiple pieces of data and how we can display lists using for loops. Then we'll refactor our array into a highscore class. With our display set up, we will learn the commands to access our player prefs and the logic we need to sort and store our data. Finally we'll see how we can use mobile keyboards and examine a faster method of saving data for mobile platforms. From basic preferences like display settings to more complex structures like high scores, it's important to understand how to save data after we close our game.

Digital -Tutors - Unity Mobile Game Development: Player Functionality
1 hrs. 22 min. | December 23, 2011 | Unity 3d 3.4 | Author: Joshua Kinney

 

 

This Unity tutorial will create the basic framework for our main character such as, movement, camera position, weapons, and applying damage to enemies. Throughout the tutorial, we'll learn how to manipulate Unity's Player Relative Control prefab to give us our third person view and then we'll learn how to create the desired player movement based off of those scripts. After that, we'll get into creating weapon functionality for our assault rifle and our shotgun using our own custom scripts. Finally, we'll end the course by applying our weapon damage to affect an enemy's health and make them explode when that health reaches zero.

 

In this series of tutorials, we will teach you the techniques and steps that we used when creating the lighting for the subway level used throughout our Unity Mobile Game Development series. We will start by using a simple scene to demonstrate topics such as realtime shadows and lighting, we will also explore the process of lightmapping inside of Unity, allowing us to bake indirect illumination, shadows and ambient occlusion directly into our texture maps. While discussing lightmaps, we will show you a number of methods for getting a proper lightmapping result based on your object's UVs. We will also discuss how lights and shadows play a critically important role in conveying a certain mood or an atmosphere within our environments.

 

In this Unity tutorial we learn how to assemble our level and how to add details to make our level more interesting and exciting. Throughout the tutorial we will learn how to assemble the core of our game level and then we will advance through the stages of set dressing by blocking in major details. After we've blocked in our details, we'll become more intentional with our design by adding, taking away, or rearranging our props for the betterment of our overall design.

 

This Unity tutorial will discuss the process of creating a custom Graphical User Interface for our mobile game on the Android tablet. Through out these lessons, we'll create our own custom scripts to create the exact behavior we want from our user interface and how we implement those to work with our Android tablet. We'll create buttons that will allow us to fire, reload, and swap our weapons. We'll also create the functionality to give the player feedback on how much ammo, time, and health they have during the game.