Workflow

I'm interested in hearing what workflows folks are adopting, what works and what doesn't. It sounds like Photoshop is very well-supported in Unity, which is good to hear.

I understand that the "golden workflow" is Maya / Photoshop -> Unity -> Game -> Profit, but I'm curious as to how well this works in practice (most everyone says perfectly...) as well as what folks who are perhaps not able (or willing) to pony up $2k for Maya are doing.

I also would like Unity to succeed commercially (since I don't want to have to toss it out and learn something new next year), and it seems to me that a $250-1000 product that essentially requires a $2000 product to use successfully is not a recipe for success.

My current setup is Max 4.2 (which doesn't export to FBX), Silo, Blender. It seems like my only option for Silo and Max is either to go through Blender (which will lose animation in the case of Max) or via .3ds (which will lose animation). I am kind of stuck with Max 4.2 (my license is Asia/Pacific and I live in the US now, and just getting them to acknowledge my existence has been a chore) and in any event consider it overpriced. (Upgrading Max would cost as much as buying Maya or Lightwave.)

XSI is $500 but I don't like its UI (I have a license somewhere). I haven't touched Maya since 1.5 and never found it terribly easy to use.

 

Oh yeah -- and what are people doing about version control?

 

You hurt me deep right there...*wimper*. XSI is great! Blasphemy! Ok, ok... I need more sleep. ;-)

Maya is in version 7 now I belive, so you might want to try out a demo of it. 1.5 - 7...A lot changes in that timeframe. ;-)

I use XSI + photoshop on PC and network my stuff to my mac. I also actually script on my PC with the Visual C# ide because I am picky about code formatting and the free stuff I have on the mac doesn't cut it for me. I have both machines about a foot apart so it causes no issues for me.

But really, buying a copy of Maya or whatever is rarely ever going to be a waste of money.

-Jeremy

 

So can you do skinned character animation in XSI and have it flow through to Unity properly?

 

Yep, so far so good. Autodesk also updated their FBX plugin for XSI 5.0.

-Jeremy

 

I'm not *touching* Maya until I see a solid Universal binary (which will demonstrate a certain level of commitment to Mac OS X from a company with a history of buying Mac products and gutting or discontinuing them -- Cleaner, Luminaire, etc. etc.).

Cinema4D is looking like a reasonable option.

Is anyone out there working with Max? The upgrade costs are unreasonable, but it's the package I know best.

 

Well I am a CINEMA 4D user so I would of course suggest to go with C4D. There is already a UB version of C4D available and it runs very well on OSX. A nice thing about C4D is that you don't have to buy the big bundle all at once...you can buy the core module and whatever else you need so that makes for a good piece of software for a very reasonable price. You should try the demo!

Thomas

 

I'll give C4D another look. I've used it before.

 

I can attest to C4D, it's a marvelous product that's getting better everyday. The next release will be a thing of beauty

Cheers

 

I use Illustrator and Photoshop for textures, Blender and Cheetah3D for modeling, dim3 Inspire for skeletal animation and exporting as an .fbx, and Bryce for terrain generation. I keep "trumpeting" dim3 Inspire as a free solution for getting skeletal animations from Blender into Unity, but it has little documentation and is hard to learn or get used to. But it works, once you know what you're doing!

I jotted down some dim3 Inspire workarounds here (be sure to read my first post in the thread, where I talk about navigating in Inspire's 3D view):

http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=16013

It's a bit disorganized, but ah well. Inspire seems to work well for low-poly objects or characters with few UV textures. I tried it out on a high-poly character with several textures, and it turned up in Unity with textures splattered all over the place. It's best to use one or two textures (UV mapping) for the head and body instead of individual textures for each part of the body.

 

I use Illustrator and Photoshop for textures, Blender and Cheetah3D for modeling, dim3 Inspire for skeletal animation and exporting as an .fbx, and Bryce for terrain generation. I keep "trumpeting" dim3 Inspire as a free solution for getting skeletal animations from Blender into Unity, but it has little documentation and is hard to learn or get used to. But it works, once you know what you're doing!

I jotted down some dim3 Inspire workarounds here (be sure to read my first post in the thread, where I talk about navigating in Inspire's 3D view):

http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=16013

It's a bit disorganized, but ah well. Inspire seems to work well for low-poly objects or characters with few UV textures. I tried it out on a high-poly character with several textures, and it turned up in Unity with textures splattered all over the place. It's best to use one or two textures (UV mapping) for the head and body instead of individual textures for each part of the body.

 

Hm, now aftter looking at Cinema4D, I think I might just go that way. I was pretty impressed. The price is easier to swallow than Maya's, too.... :wink: