First steps in Unity

So today we were introduced to the game engine we'll be working with for the next 3 years. Unity is a great piece of software. It's very flexible will tool sets and allows you to really add the finishing touches to your models. The basic tools (move, rotate, scale) were easy to pick up because they're pretty much the same in Maya and across any 3D software which I didn't actually know. On that note there were a lot of new things introduced to me when I was going through the basics of the program and I've put up some screenshots to demonstrate some. 

This image shows several different things that were new to me but first I'll start with the lighting. In Maya I've messed around with lighting, shadows and reflectivity so this wasn't exactly new so to speak. The standard types of lights being the spot light, directional light and points light were easy to grasp but it was only until  messed around with all this lighting in Unity that I discovered how lighting can really have an effect on the kind of mood and atmosphere of a game. It's one thing to see it when you're playing on a game but you get a real sense of meaning when you try it yourself. Here you can see I was trying to accomplish a night time setting by tinting the light a blue/purple colour which I think actually worked pretty well~

The skybox is another component in this image. The sky box is very simple to set up but very effective but I've still to learn hot to perhaps set up my own skybox but for now the default ones are all good. I think the skybox definitely works well with lighting and would also have a big impact on the kind of lighting you decide to choose dependant on the time of day. Here you can't see the source of the light but the colour is suppose to work along side the night time setting. It's not too bad for a first go~

The next thing is the water. Now this particular asset is only available on Unity Pro but it's a nice and easy way to add some interest in your scene. I've recently downloaded Unity 3.5.1 on my laptop and you can get different water effects such as a more calm and slow one which would be ideal for lakes. I also had a go at changing the colour but I actually think it looks rather strange. I tried changing it into a orange colour to go with a sunset drop I made but the colour is only visible from some angles so I don't think it worked very well.

This was a package that really surprised me because it was a lot easier to achieve this look than I thought it would be. Here I used the terrain tools to create everything from hills to mountains in the click of a button or rather a click and hold. The terrain tool is amazing for creating a suitable environment for your models as you can see below.

This is basically a more detailed version of the loading docks I made at the top but this time I added a rocky terrain to surround it and you can see how much of a difference it makes. It's now starting to look like something slowly but surely. All it needs now is some texturing~

So, sticking to the terrain tools you can paint textures on your terrain. At first I experimented with the pre-set textures which aren't actually so bad but to achieve a more realistic environment the trick is to use more than one texture so I went hunting on http://www.cgtextures.com/ to find some appropriate rocky/mossy textures to add to my piece. I think I used 3 overall and it's starting to look pretty good. I don't think there's a limit to how many textures you can really use but I do think that too many would swamp the environment and for this dock I've created here, the terrain is part of the background so it doesn't need to be in such great detail plus, you don;t want to draw attention away from your main assets.

This is my finished piece and the end of the Unity tutorial as it were. As you can see I've also added in some trees which can be found under the terrain tools as well. It has many trees, textures and plants to offer but these are only good for decorating things in the distance like I've done here otherwise it's more of a modelling job in Maya.

So overall there was lots of new things that I learned by doing this dock exercise and I'm more than sure it'll all come together when I start creating my own level.