Mind-Melding Unity and Blender for 3D Game Development

Mind-Melding Unity and Blender for 3D Game Development

by Spencer Grey
Released December 2021
Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
ISBN: 9781801071550

Read it now on the O’Reilly learning platform with a 10-day free trial.

O’Reilly members get unlimited access to books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial

Book description

Add Blender to your Unity game development projects to unlock new possibilities and decrease your dependency on third-party creators

Key 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 game

Book Description

Blender 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 Unity

Who this book is for

This 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.

Table of contents

  1. Mind-Melding Unity and Blender for 3D Game Development
  2. Contributors
  3. About the author
  4. About the reviewers
  5. Preface
    1. Who this book is for
    2. What this book covers
    3. To get the most out of this book
    4. Download the example code files
    5. Code in Action
    6. Download the color images
    7. Conventions used
    8. Get in touch
    9. Share Your Thoughts
  6. Section 1: There and Back Again – An Asset Roundtrip with Unity and Blender
  7. Chapter 1: Melding Unity and Blender
    1. What is Unity?
      1. Top 12 Reasons for Using Unity
    2. What Is Blender?
      1. Top 8 and a Half Reasons for Using Blender
    3. Requirements for this Book
      1. Knowledge Prerequisites
      2. Software Prerequisites
      3. Hardware Prerequisites
      4. How to Read This Book
    4. Getting Additional Help
    5. Summary
  8. Chapter 2: Gathering Our Resources
    1. Technical Requirements
    2. Creating Our Unity Project
      1. The Unity Hub
      2. Selecting a Project Template
      3. Your new project
      4. Creating the project folders
    3. Defining Our Mini-Game Level
      1. Mini-Game Gameplay Mechanics
    4. Using the Asset Store
      1. What is the Asset Store?
      2. Searching the Asset Store
    5. Using the Package Manager
    6. Getting ready for Blender
      1. Installing the FBX Exporter package
      2. Exporting the turret
    7. Additional Assets to Download
      1. Audio Assets
      2. Textures
    8. Summary
  9. Chapter 3: Entering the Blender Zone for the First Time
    1. Technical Requirements
    2. Introducing Blender
      1. The Toolbar (Area 1)
      2. Editor, mode selection, and mode menus (Area 2)
      3. Pivot, Snap, and Proportional Editing (Area 3)
      4. Header menu bar (Area 4)
      5. View modes and tools (Area 5)
      6. Axes Gizmo (Area 6)
      7. Zoopancamper! (Area 7)
      8. The Outliner Panel (Area 8)
      9. The Properties Panel (Area 9)
      10. The Status Bar (Area 10)
    3. Monkeying Around with the Monkey Head
      1. Translation: Moving the Monkey
      2. Rotation: Twirling the Monkey
      3. Scaling: Mushing the Monkey
      4. The Sidebar
      5. Applying your transforms
      6. Getting ready to move on
    4. Entering Edit Mode
      1. Creating a Monkey-corn
    5. Altering the Turret
      1. Carving Out a Lid
      2. Creating the launch tube
      3. Creating the Struts
      4. Fixing a flaw
    6. Summary
  10. Chapter 4: Asset Assimilation: Returning to Unity
    1. Technical Requirements
    2. Preparing the Turret for Gameplay
      1. Importing the Turret
      2. Restructuring the Turret
      3. Texturing the turret
      4. Creating a material for the missile tube
      5. Applying the material to the tube
      6. Planning the turret behavior
      7. Adding in iTween
    3. Scripting the Turret
      1. Setting up turret actions
      2. Tag, you're it! Creating a placeholder player hero
      3. Finally, Scanning!
      4. Testing the ScanAction
      5. Preparing for the ShootAction
      6. Creating the ShootAction
      7. Testing the ShootAction: Pew! Pew! Pew!
      8. Preparing for the LaunchAction
      9. Creating the LaunchAction
      10. Testing the LaunchAction
      11. Code Checklist for the Chapter
      12. The Ultimate Advanced Unity Tip
    4. Summary
  11. Section 2: The Right Stuff: Scenery, Props, and Characters
  12. Chapter 5: On the Level: Making Modular Scenery
    1. Technical Requirements
    2. Understanding Modular Level Design
      1. Setting our Goals
      2. The Humble Floor
      3. Walls and corners
    3. Blocking Out our Level
    4. A Quick Recap of our Blender Know-How
      1. Navigation and hot-keys
      2. Knowing Your Numpad
    5. Creating Floors
    6. Creating a Wall
      1. Creating a wall corner
    7. Texture Mapping, UV Mapping/Unwrapping, and Materials
      1. UV Mapping 101
      2. UV Unwrapping 101
      3. Materials 101
      4. Unwrapping and texturing the Wall
      5. Working in the UV Editing Workspace
      6. Unwrapping and texturing the wall corner
    8. Summary
  13. Chapter 6: Living It Up: Adding Fun with Animation
    1. Technical Requirements
    2. Understanding Basic Animation Concepts
      1. Keyframes
    3. Animating in Blender
      1. Frame rate
      2. Working with Keyframes
      3. Auto-keying
      4. Markers
    4. Creating Animated Blastdoors
      1. Blastdoor creation scheme
      2. Creating the Blastdoor Doorframe
      3. Creating the Simple Door
      4. Animating the Simple Door
      5. Creating the Complex Door
      6. Animating the complex door
    5. Texturing the Blastdoors
      1. Texturing the Doorframe
      2. Texturing the Simple Door
      3. Texturing the Complex Door
    6. Exporting Your Goodies
    7. Summary
  14. Chapter 7: Prep Work: Materials, Grids, and Snapping
    1. Technical Requirements
    2. Getting Our Act Together: Collecting Our Great Stuff in Unity
      1. Importing into Unity
    3. Living in a Material World: Materials for Walls, Doors, and Floors
      1. Creating our new materials
    4. Snapping and the Scene Grid
      1. Changing the color of the grid lines
      2. Vertex Snapping
    5. Summary
  15. Chapter 8: Laying Out the Level
    1. Technical Requirements
    2. Laying Out the Level
      1. Level Layout Tips
      2. Areas A and B
      3. Area C
      4. Area C2
      5. Area D
      6. Area E
      7. Area F
      8. Area G
    3. The Sky's the Limit: Adding a Skybox
    4. Sounds Like Trouble: Adding some Audio Effects
    5. Summary
  16. Chapter 9: Secret Weapon #1: Deploying ProBuilder
    1. Technical Requirements
    2. An Introduction to ProBuilder
      1. ProBuilder vs. Blender
    3. History of ProBuilder
    4. Installing ProBuilder
    5. Exploring The ProBuilder Toolbar
      1. Orange-Colored Options – Tools and Editors
      2. Creating Objects with ProBuilder
      3. Blue Colored Options: Selection Modifiers and Actions
      4. Green Colored Options: Object Editing Tools
      5. Red-Colored Options: Element Editing Tools
      6. Other ProBuilder options
    6. Bridgework – Making Movable Scenery
    7. Summary
  17. Chapter 10: Secret Weapon #2: Animating with Timeline
    1. Technical Requirements
    2. Introducing Timeline
      1. When to use Timeline for animation
      2. Timeline Tracks
    3. Prepping the Prism: Getting our asset ready to animate
      1. Creating the Prism Prefab
    4. Captain to the Bridge!—Animating our Bridge with Timeline
      1. Creating a Timeline
      2. Creating an Animation Track
      3. The Plan for the Bridge
      4. Recording an Infinite Clip
      5. Animating the prism walkway
      6. Previewing your Animation
      7. Finishing the bridge animation
      8. Adding Audio
    5. Summary
  18. Chapter 11: We Could Be Heroes: Blender Character Modeling
    1. Technical Requirements
    2. Blender Command Review
      1. 3D View Commands
      2. Miscellaneous 3D View Commands
      3. Edit Mode Commands
      4. Pro Tip: Faster Command Access
    3. Prepping for the marine
      1. Organizing the objects in your scene
      2. Randomizing Colors
    4. Modeling the Marine
      1. Head
      2. Torso
      3. The Arm
      4. The Hand
      5. The Leg
    5. The Boot
      1. Touchups
      2. Parenting
      3. Finalizing the Model and the File
    6. Summary
  19. Chapter 12: It Was Rigged!: Character Rigging
    1. Technical Requirements
    2. Just One Thing…
    3. UV-Unwrapping and Texturing the Marine
      1. UV Unwrapping Refresher
      2. Loading the texture image into the UV space
      3. Getting started with the Marine
      4. Processing the Head
      5. Processing the Torso
      6. Processing the Arms
      7. Processing the Hands
      8. Processing the Legs
      9. Processing the Feet
    4. Rigging the Marine
    5. Exporting the marine
    6. Getting started with Mixamo
    7. Doing excellent things with the marine
    8. Downloading Animations
    9. Summary
  20. Section 3: Assets Assemble! Putting It All Together
  21. Chapter 13: Animation and Movement In-Game
    1. Technical Requirements
    2. Getting the marine ready for duty
      1. Creating and applying the marine material
      2. Creating the marine prefab
      3. Animating the Marine
    3. Adding lights to the level
    4. Marine movement and Camera Control
      1. Camera Tracking with Secret Weapon #4: Cinemachine
    5. Animating the Scenery
      1. Animating the Blast doors
      2. Animating the Bridge
    6. Summary
  22. Chapter 14: Endgame: Adding Spit and Polish
    1. Technical Requirements
    2. Make with the shooting already
      1. Preparing to Shoot
      2. Adding Sound to the shooting
      3. Scripting the Shooting, Part I
      4. Scripting the Shooting, Part II
      5. A Marine Checklist
    3. Making the Turrets Go Boom
      1. A Checklist for the Turret and Missile
      2. Debugging the Mayhem
    4. Creating a Main Menu
      1. Changing the menu text
      2. Adding audio to the menu
      3. Setting Up Scene Loading
    5. Adding Post Processing
    6. Creating the Final Room
    7. Summary
    8. Why subscribe?
  23. Other Books You May Enjoy
    1. Packt is searching for authors like you
    2. Share Your Thoughts

Product information

  • Title: Mind-Melding Unity and Blender for 3D Game Development
  • Author(s): Spencer Grey
  • Release date: December 2021
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781801071550