C4d and the Unity Game Engine (great combo!)

[boxy]

Then all you have to learn is programing :banghead:

hehe, there's the rub. I've been trying to digest JavaScript for a couple of months now, but I'm not a natural and don't have any particular interest in coding. Trouble is, you can't get very far without it, not even in Unity, so I keep trying. As far as the visuals go though, Unity and C4D make a great combo through fbx.
Boxy

[mikeh64]

yes, unity looks cool

I have not tried it, what do you need to know coding for?

could you make a simple "walk around the inside of a house" game without coding? (i.e., no characters, plot, interactive things, etc - just a simple "move around a space" thing)

mike

[Tank_3D_Attack]

Hi Escondar,

Great to hear that you are satisfied with UNITY. Unity and C4D are indeed a very good combo and I can only give the advise to at least try the demo (for those who haven't checked it out yet). Oh and don't forget that you can WIN UNITY if you enter the quiz in our december issue :)

@Mikeh64

You will need to code for certain circumstances. Unity provides scripts for as you said "simple walk arounds in a house" or whatever kind of thing. That is easy to do. You just attach the provided script to a camera and that's it.


Thomas

PS: Forgot to mention that we have an interview with David Helgason (CEO) from OTEE (UNITY) in this issue (January2006) so check it out :)

[escondar]

Hello Tank,

Thanks for pointing me to Unity. Interesting interview with one of the founders of the program in this months issue of 3dattack by the way...

I too struggle with programing but I bought myself about a hundred coding-for-begginners books for Christmas and I hope to atleast be able to dabble. Problem is I discover (after purchase) that a lot of these "Begginner" books state quietly on page 11 that previous coding is required to understand the book. Oh well....

No better way to spend the holiday then staring blankly at pages of code feeling like a moron. :eek:

[ooo]

I also have to thank 3D-attack for pointing me to Unity! I downloaded the demo and hope to give a go next week. Until now i developed some games in Director and some shockwave, but that looks so oldfashioned compared to Unity. I have high expectations!

odo

[Duffdaddy]

I used to use Axel for basic educational games until development stopped on it - then I heard of Unity in 3DAttack - downloaded the demo yesterday and gave it a whirl. Really nice. Understandable and straight forward - but I'm no coder either, just a bit of java script and espresso and that's it. Damn!! I wish I had a head for coding too.

[Tank_3D_Attack]

Hi again guys,

Well I am not a coder myself but I think Unity offers a great way for even non-coders like me. If I really have an issue with something..well then I get help lol...good to have a friend who CAN code. But seriously, if you are able to do a little bit of coding then you should be able to tackle UNITY. If you have problems then just ask your questions on their forum...they are usually really helpful over there.

Thomas

[escondar]

They even have a forum section dedicated to the matching up of art/design concept people with those who think in terms of code.

I posted in this forum and within an hour I had an offer from a coder who wanted to collaborate.

On another note, the bake object feature in C4d 9.5 has great application within this world. If you model a mesh, then texture, bumpmap and light it (if it is a fixed object .... say a building or a landscape element) then BAKE OBJECT. It creates an exportable mesh for easy import inti Unity and a complex texture that looks as though it has been well lit in the gmae engine but is using only the ambient light. Everybody knows this old trick, I'm only mentioning it because the workflow is easy between our beloved C4d and Unity.

I whipped off a simple example to illustrate...

[boxy]

I like that. The fact you can build scenes in Cinema 4D complete with shadows et al and just drag the fbx into Unity is awsome. You can easily set up a walkabout scenario with the fps prefab too, so you don't actually need to code anything to be able to explore the scene in realtime. This is a Unity screenshot from a C4D built scene.
Cheers
Boxy

http://www.savbox.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/posts/TreeTest.jpg

http://www.savbox.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/posts/Unity.jpg

[escondar]

Nice stuff! You may regret posting it... as I may pester you (once or twice) on how to do stuff that I can't figure out. I have had better luck with 3ds files then FBX with drag and drop baked textures from C4d for instance.

[ooo]

Oboyoboyoboy I love this!
I really need to jump into this. Anyone knows when the introductory prices will expire?

odo

[escondar]

I just discovered how much can be accomplished within the Unity system WITHOUT coding... using the game object trigger drag-and-drop System.

Definitely possible to achieve a certain amout of satisfactory interactivity without much coding skills. Great way to start and great way to learn about what code is doing underneath the hood.

As anybody developed a successful import of FBX animations into Unity from C4d? I'd like to see their pipeline.

[Tank_3D_Attack]

I just discovered how much can be accomplished within the Unity system WITHOUT coding... using the game object trigger drag-and-drop System.

Definitely possible to achieve a certain amout of satisfactory interactivity without much coding skills. Great way to start and great way to learn about what code is doing underneath the hood.

As anybody developed a successful import of FBX animations into Unity from C4d? I'd like to see their pipeline.


I haven't tested animated objects that extensively but create a cube for example...make it rotate by setting keyframes and export it as FBX. Import that into Unity and hit play. It should work just fine and rotate. I haven't really had the time to check more complex animations yet but I am sure one of us will have more info on that :) The simple cube rotation although works just as expected. Hope the same goes for more complicated things.

Thomas

[escondar]

I can always get complex baked lighting to import with 3ds files from C4d but never via FBX.

[MPS]

hey this looks pretty cool. It would be good to have a play with it. I take it that its only on the mac though? If so, can anyone recommend a similar pc engine, (I was going to take a look at the half life 2 engine but it costs just a little toooooo much!!:D).

[interactiveBoy]

hey this looks pretty cool. It would be good to have a play with it. I take it that its only on the mac though? If so, can anyone recommend a similar pc engine, (I was going to take a look at the half life 2 engine but it costs just a little toooooo much!!:D).

$39 is too much?

*edit*
Just looked at Unity's site. In all honesty, I wouldn't even consider the Source engine for something like this. Unity is what Shockwave 3D wanted to be but never quite happened.

This looks slick. Might have to check this out a little deeper.

[boxy]

I can always get complex baked lighting to import with 3ds files from C4d but never via FBX.

Hey I might be pestering you too, there's a lot to learn in there!! :)

The problem with 3DS is that they are only supporting it as an old legacy format so I am trying to get into the habit of using fbx.
Is your fbx problem something to do with textures not showing up in Unity? If so its something to do with the texture paths. It may be that you need to manually place the textures you used in C4D into the right folder at the right level of your Unity project.
However, when you export the fbx to the right place in the Unity Assets project folder, a new folder called xx.fbm is automatically created and your textures are copied to it. In addition to this, I think Unity should generate a Materials folder in which Unity materials for each object are also automatically created. It is these materials that should already be loaded complete with assigned textures when you place an instance of your model in the Unity scene. BTW when you export from C4D experiment with the prefs>export>fbx6 settings. At one point in an earlier release of Unity I was advised to uncheck the 'Embed Textures' option, but that may have been a bug which has since been fixed in the recent update. Wait, guess I shouldn't go into it too much in case thats not the problem hehe...
Boxy

[wuensch]

hey this looks pretty cool. It would be good to have a play with it. I take it that its only on the mac though? If so, can anyone recommend a similar pc engine, (I was going to take a look at the half life 2 engine but it costs just a little toooooo much!!:D).

imho There is nothing comparable on PC- technically yes, but not userfriendly wise--
I have been searching myself.

[MPS]

Thanks Oli. I might have to 'borrow' one of the macs during my work time from work to do a few tests... could be beneficial, erm, to my employer...

[Rich-Art]

I want a MAC!!! :sad:


Looks like a lot of fun to play with this engine. But I have a PC. So no fun for me.



Peace,
Rich-Art. :thumbsup:

[wuensch]

I want a MAC!!! :sad:


Looks like a lot of fun to play with this engine. But I have a PC. So no fun for me.



Peace,
Rich-Art. :thumbsup:

I have a PC, too.
Ufortunately Unity for PC is no priority on their list & can take considerable time till its gets done (if ever).
I am actually working on wife to buy herself a new & decent Mac (she is using a 400Mhz Ibook now-- too slow for Unity) to dive into Unity .:beer:

But looking a different 3D authoring environments I haev come to the conclusion that Unity is THE app.
Under combat conditions (in a commercial project) it might be worth purchsing a Mac just to run Unity.

Olli

[escondar]

For PC users... there is always Torque. But the workflow from C4d is a lot less elegant to my mind... I do think as a whole Torque has more depth and a much more proven track record.

But Unity is a pleasure to work with for us C4ders and their last free update proves that they are commited to rapid and comprehensive improvement across the board, not unlike MAXON.

A note maybe for Shrek: The workflow from Maya to Unity is even better... when asked if they couldn't provide this for C4d users the Unity developers stated they were hoping for more cooperation from MAXON to facilitate this. Are the fine people at MAXON fully aware of the excitement surrounding the teaming up of these two great software packages?

There a lot of people like myself who struggled with Torque and almost got Maya to be able easily make 3-d game content.

As noted above, the new baking features and FBX exporting in MAXON lend themselves beautifully to creating sweet looking content in the Unity world. Still learning about animation export/ import.

pardon my rambling... i'm excited. :applause:

[Rich-Art]

Well I must talk to my wife than. She want to buy a new laptop.
THIS MUST BE A MAC than.. :D


Peace,
Rich-Art. :thumbsup:

[wbj]

Is your fbx problem something to do with textures not showing up in Unity? If so its something to do with the texture paths. It may be that you need to manually place the textures you used in C4D into the right folder at the right level of your Unity project.
However, when you export the fbx to the right place in the Unity Assets project folder, a new folder called xx.fbm is automatically created and your textures are copied to it.

FBX stores absolute texture paths in the FBX file. If you move the fbx file to another computer or change the name of the texture folder, a FBX importer can't find those textures.

When embedding the textures, this limitation is gone (but the fbx file gets bigger). When importing a FBX file with embedded textures, the importer automatically creates a folder NameOfTheFBXFile.fbm which includes the textures and makes them accessible for further processing.

Best regards,

wbj

[williamsburroughs]

Be sure to wait to purchase a Mac until after MacWorld....rumors abound that we will see the Intel-Mac based machines then...so you might be able to run OSX and Windows on the same box. :)

[lildragon]

But looking a different 3D authoring environments I haev come to the conclusion that Unity is THE app.
Under combat conditions (in a commercial project) it might be worth purchsing a Mac just to run Unity.

Olli

I've came to this conclusion, even after playing with Beyond Virtual http://www.beyondvirtual.com. Sorry for waking up this thread but I need help :)

Ok, I've been an avid PC user for years and never really got into Macs. The last experience I had with a Mac was soured years ago during a web design gig I had. The GPU made me cringe, and the one button mouse and tiny keyboard weren't too exciting.
Fast forward a few years and I came upon Unity, the first app that made me want to get a Mac. I was comparing Unity against Beyond Virtual, and I must say it beats it hands down (with acception with features like realtime shadowing, which will come), the community there is much more interesting, the docs on Unity are second to none, and the support is encouraging.
So I did some research for hours on the new intel Macs, namely because there's some apps on Windoze that I still need. For instance this is my current pipeline for my studio

- C4D (exclusively, so I know it works well with Unity)
- Maya
- Zbrush
- Mudbox (will replace Zbrush once available, and currently only runs on PC)
- Photoshop
- Flash/Dreamweaver
- Beyond Virtual (which will change to Unity)

And that's about it, now I look at it, I can pretty much use an Intel Mac primarily hmmm.
The Mac OS X is simply amazing and my wife would get a kick out of using it for sure.

Anyhoo what I need help on is choosing one of these lil beasts, I'm a total Mac noob and have no idea what is what really. Both the iMac and Mac mini are amazing space savers and with this http://www.apple.com/macosx/switch/howto/kvm.html I can have a great setup going. One thing tho is that Macs are pricy lil things much like the Ipods sheesh! Apples marketing is superb is that respect. Anyhoo, so I would like some help deciding what's best price/value wise, and I'm not into buying it off e-bay especially electronics :P So take into consideration I was about to buy a new dual core PC next week:

Here are things I would look for

- Dual core CPU
- Capable graphic card (I'm currently using a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra on my PC, so something to match or better that)
- minimum 2gigs of ram
- decent HDD space
- Dual Screens are a must (but how would that work with A KVM?

In all honesty, I'm really impressed with what I seen with the latest Macs and the new OS X (Vista looks like the same crap all over again to me :roll:) and the new Mac ads are hilarious and well so true :shrug: heh.

Anyhoo, any help would be greatly appreciated, cause it looks like I'm about to drop some serious coin. It's too bad I can't demo the engine somehow on the PC, or even watch a video of someone using it before a purchase... but the long and short of it is, I'll at least have a Mac :) which gives me access to apps like Final Cut Pro and Shake!

Cheers!

[ooo]

Anyhoo, any help would be greatly appreciated, cause it looks like I'm about to drop some serious coin. It's too bad I can't demo the engine somehow on the PC, or even watch a video of someone using it before a purchase... but the long and short of it is, I'll at least have a Mac :) which gives me access to apps like Final Cut Pro and Shake!

Cheers!

If you are really serious about this and want a good start on Mac then wait for WWDC (August 7) for the new "Power Macs" (Mac Pro) rollout. That's the only real choice if you want a pro machine for 3D with good graphics, expandability, etc etc. But if you want a decent Mac for a decent price I would opt for the iMac (with second screen). Will surely get the job done but has it limitations. I guess you know the new Intel Macs can run Windows too so with parallels you don't need no KVM but run your windows apps simultanuously with OSX.

odo

[Matariki]

I can always get complex baked lighting to import with 3ds files from C4d but never via FBX.

Maybe I am missing something but why are you going to get the baked lighting imported using 3ds files? As far as I know Unity supports the native c4d files. Is there anything that 3ds does thats not in the c4d files?

Cheers

[ooo]

Maybe I am missing something but why are you going to get the baked lighting imported using 3ds files? As far as I know Unity supports the native c4d files. Is there anything that 3ds does thats not in the c4d files?

Cheers


I think Escondar is referring to the previous version of Unity (this thread is already 6 months old). The latest Unity-update brings the native C4D support I think.

[Matariki]

I think Escondar is referring to the previous version of Unity (this thread is already 6 months old). The latest Unity-update brings the native C4D support I think.

Eh, well, thanks, talking about being stupid ...

[interactiveBoy]

I have a question for you Unity users...(I plan to treat myself to a license for Christmas)

I've done mapping and level editing for the Source engine, and have become accustomed to re-using assets to cut down on Ram usage as well as having small, repeated textures strategically used to cut down on GPU memory usage as well.

I see the flexibility that is granted on the front end of design by creating everything in C4D and just importing to Unity. However, I'd like to keep file sizes as small as possible as well as texture memory. Is it possible to make say, 3 or 4 different trees that you'd then procedurally place (or even manually place through scripting for more control) to get a forest? I guess I'm thinking of cloning models in Unity. As opposed to creating a whole forest in C4D (even if using the same model over and over) I would think that would convert to unique geometry and textures per tree and eat up ram and GPU?

Is it possible to create a library of models/textures/assets and call them up at runtime? (Much like HL2 in Source does)

I would like to read your thoughts on work flow for keeping things efficient when it comes to cloned models and textures.

Thanks

[escondar]

Whoah! Great to see this old thread up and running. Yes my problems with FBX have been solved nicely with the new release of Unity. My excitement about the program has become tenfold since the FREE update. It DOES have seamless C4d integration. You can have C4d open and make changes to a model, save it and in real time the asset will update within UNity. Comes with a great first person shooter demo to learn with and scre around with. they really created a huge upgrade with this release.

Check it out. It will blow you away.

[rob rhodes]

Wow this is amazing, i remember the thread from before but didn't pay it much attention as it was a Mac product. But just looking at their website now and it looks pretty good. Is it as good/easy as they claim? Im an architect and use C4D (and now maxwell to render) I have used Unreal Ed in the past with textures all baked in C4D but that was just not a time effient process - not to mention frustrating at times! All I'm looking for is a realtime renderer that I can use for my buildings that just takes my C4D model directly in so I can explore it in 1st person and can show progress to clients.

Questions:
1. Are simple movers like doors opening and lifts moving easy to do or is there actually more scripting needed than they let on?

2. Im a PC guy but actually all the software I use is avaiable on Mac anyway and I think dual boot OS will start to become more common soon, so is it worth buying a mac for? and would it run on a mac mini (to start with)?

3. How is it compared to unreal for handling lare texture maps and high poly counts - I found unreal surprisingly good for that. Does it handle normal maps?

Sorry for all the questions but looks very exciting!

Cheers, Rob

[escondar]

Hi,

If you post your questions here:

http://forum.unity3d.com/index.php?sid=96c905b16fedc9634cf742080b99c71c

they will answer more comprehensively than I can. Simple door opening and so on would be quite easy. Architectural walk-throughs would be effectively handled with Unity and C4d in my opinion. The first person prefab is drag and drop. So are basic physics.

As far as worth a Mac purchase.... without branching off on another thread... I think that the pro macs revealed in a week or two will speak for themselves.

[ooo]

Also check out 3Dattack magazine. in the latest issue there is a tutorial for and arch-viz walkthrough. In the goodies folder you also find the file (for windows too!).

odo

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