Best Practices for projects
Best Practices for projects
Good day,
I am using Blender to develop assets and Unity 3D for the final products.
My goal is not so much a game as an interactive "map" that goes along with a short novel I am working on for my grandsons.
I'd like them to be able to visit the sites in the book though it is so very hard to compete with imagination!
I have searched various sites for best practices regarding things like:
1) Folder structure(s) to make working as efficient as possible; do you leave the Blender files in your Unity project or do you have some form of deployment?
2) This project is for family, not for the world so no MMO constraints but I would like to make a fairly good sized map that they could explore; I need information on the best way to implement medium to larger maps in Unity. I have found a couple of links but they are not terribly helpful or my knowledge base is not what it should be to understand.
3) Any suggestions or hints to help me get this thing moving. I have one Medieval city pretty much done but I need to marry it to a mountain landscape. I have close to 100 assets completed from pickaxes to my interpretation of what a golden dragon should be in my "world".
4) Finally, I am hoping to simply find an even mostly friendly site where I can posit a question and get an actual answer instead of a critique of my limited knowledge. I spend 39 years as an analyst/programmer and have been married for 4 decades so I think I can handle a little criticism. It's just nice to get an actual answer from time to time which can be rare on some sites.
Best regards to all; I plan to take a look at ongoing projects soon as I truly love 2D and 3D art development.
As for assets, everybody has a personal preference and as long as you can find everything you need it doesnt really matter. I usually put all of my imported models and textures into one folder, then I have a seperate prefabs folder that has the model+any scripts etc that i have attached, then I can simply drag and drop them into my scene!
Now I am by no means an expert, but unity has a fantastic terrain building system that is explained very well in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q09hta5itFQ
You can create believable landscapes even just using the unity standard trees, rocks, etc as well as free models on the asset store! Unity comes with a good water shader as well! You will need to cleverly rotate rocks and/or primitives in order to create overhangs and caves though, as the terrain editor is incapable of this.
This will be a lot of work, and one idea I have to reduce the actual amount of work you have to do is create a 2D map showing the various locations, where your family can click on them and it will take them to a different scene. This way you are designing just the important locations as opposed to an entire world, unfortunately this does break the feel of it being an actual world.
Another idea(if you were to be walking around first person in your world) is to use height to your advantage, using buildings, mountains, trees or any other barrier can trick players into believing your world is larger than it actually is. Here is a good video demonstrating this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HMtju0BjAo
specifically around 14:10
and some of these techniques are seen at 25:10 onwards, keep in mind this took a full team of probably hundreds a very long time to develop so I wouldnt plan on creating every building as a different model. =)
I hope you find something useful in this wall of text!
-EZ
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