Education

First off, can you get an educational discount on Unity? Also, what is recommended for learning how to use Unity. (Like classes/courses, books, magazines, DVDs, etc.)

 

Well there are no books, magazines, or dvd's. Yet. This will change and very soon. Unity is still young and all we have right now are a few very nice tuts now. Personally the way I learn is by messing around so far that has worked fine.

Good question about the educational thing, when the price hits 2K will there be a edu price?

Bill

 

They already do as is stated in this thred. Jeff

 

I'm working here at OTEE for 3 months (1 month left) on this very issue. My series of tutorials will be released shortly, hope you enjoy them.

Out of interest, what sort of tutorials would you like to have available? Do you have any themes in mind?

I'll be using these tutorials in our MA course in Comptuer Games Development at Queen's University Belfast this year, check it out at: http://www.sarc.qub.ac.uk/ma/computergaming.htm

Graham.

 

>>>Out of interest, what sort of tutorials would you like to have available? Do you have any themes in mind?<<<

There should be some tutorials which explain unity for people who already know how to code 3d but aren't familiar with unity itself.

Interesting content would be:

a) How does the IDE work from A-Z (and not only the obvious like describing the rotate buttons)
b) The concept behind unity/ide. I miss a tutorial which nicely presents me the glue how all this plays together. How unity works internally.
c) How are things done if you wanna go by script.
d) How are things done if you wanna go by IDE.
e) Examples for a) Do something from scratch to b) Do this certain thing.
f) Tips and Tricks

And these things structured that the refer to each other and build on each other.

*update*
You know for most of the people it's hard to pursue them to change the boat, leave the familiar and learn something new. The easier you make this transition for them the more likely they will come...

Regards,

taumel

 

Hmmm, I might regret responding to this thread since I'm tangentially involved. But my ideal tutorial for Unity would be a complete multi-level game delivered in it's entirety as a Unity package/project. Give me all the scripts, game objects, and textures rolled into a project that's all set up that I can dissect and learn from. I learn purely from example, I can't remember the last time I completed a step-by-step written tutorial. I like picking examples apart and taking away the stuff I find relevant and tweaking it to my needs. This obviously doesn't work for everyone, but reverse engineering is a very powerful practice in my opinion.

 

Delivering a completed project doesn't explain how you came to this state.

o What are the thoughts why i did so?
o What do i have to do to get this done?
o Where do i have to click in the ide?
o ...

Only a tutorial or a video can explain this. There is a lot in the ide which i've never seen explained anywhere...

 

Thanks for the suggestions Taumel, I'll be touching on all the issues you mention to some extent in the tutorials.

aNTeNNa trEE has mentioned one of the most difficult aspects of education; people learn in different ways. The tutorials will follow a step-by-step basis, however as the reader becomes more advanced and gains confidence in Unity, they will be able to try out their own ideas and even learn from other people's source code.

As Taumel says, the most difficult step in learning something new is often the very beginning, as this is where a change in habit or thought process is required. These new tutorials will hopefully break down this barrier and make Unity as easy to understand as possible.

 

Let's face it. There is actually no concept behind the tutorials which have been done so far. These are more or less encapsulated examples but without the concept how to lead an audience with different knowledge through all the points.

This is nothing undoable and obviously a lot of work but it really needs to be done.

 

Hi Doc Graham,

Can we have both (antennatree and taumel) suggestions implemented.

Thanks,

Ray

 

Hi Ray,

As long as people follow the tutorials they will learn enough about Unity to experiment by themselves.

 

Very good points Taumel and Graham. For learning a new piece of software it's nice to have tutorials that "hold your hand" and show a step by step procedure of how to complete an entire scene.

I think it would also be cool for all of the tutorials to have a "finished product" scene that people can open up to glance at and pick apart if they want to approach it from that side.

 

I really agree with you on that ethan.

Bill

 

Yeah, I think this should be a given on any tutorial (an example of the ideal finished project). Graham, we haven't talked about this, but I'm more than willing to do this part.

 

I agree with this too (for several reasons), I'll make sure this is available.

 

>>>I agree with this too (for several reasons), I'll make sure this is available.<<<

Will you also work on videos and will this be a mix or will this be pure pdfs?

For max i've experienced videos by far easier to learn from than reading through text and i think they are faster to produce. Obviously larger to download on the other side...


Regards,

taumel

 

My favorite examples of this were the old Flash tutorials that were made entirely within Flash, that was just brilliant. I guess there's no way to circumnavigate the literal method of teaching scripting through written material, but for more general 3D concepts visual examples work great. But it takes a combination of the two to acclimate people to a new piece of software of this relative complexity.

 

There is nothing worse than a video tutorial where they don't narate it though. Because you might not know what button there hitting or something and Its realy hard to track down considering its compleatly silent. Jeff

 

The video tutorials (with narration) would be an excellent method of learning Unity. I would like to do these so that they complement the tutorials I'm currently writing, not replace them. Of course, this depends on time but I will endeavour to get these complete as quickly as possible.

 

@outcast
Who said that the videos should be silent without any explaining voice?