Tutorial #1

First tutorial! Things get serious… maybe…

I was not able to actually participate in the tutorial due to some technical hiccups (MacOS wouldn’t open the Unity .pkg I had downloaded earlier in the week, so after exhausting my options during class I later brute forced the installer to work). After getting Unity installed and worked, I realised that I had not textured the model I made for the self-study.

The UV unwrapping process was rather painless, given the boxy shape of the desk model, unfortunately I did not take screenshots because, well, I forgot. After unwrapping I found a top down image of the mixing desk online, and added that to the top plane. I then made a mask using the texture painter (which I stupidly also didn’t screenshot) and finally made a very quick procedural bumped metal and procedural black fake leather/vinyl (or at least that’s what I think it is?). Both of these procedural textures are basically just voronoi noise fed into bump nodes. Upon completion of the texture I got everything ready to bake and export.

The baked texture didn’t turn out exactly as I wanted, some texture coordinate stuff got messed up with the black plastic texture, I assume because I just did an all-in-one bake and not a proper bump -> normal -> final pipeline but I do not have the energy to explore nor fix this as it is a little bit beyond the scope of this week.

Some of the texture I got a bit lazy and just painted with masks in the texture painter instead of actually putting in the effort of giving it life and detail, however I was tired at this point and didn’t really want to go through the hassle of doing every minute detail (also learning to stop my perfectionism from taking over).

After everything was baked and ready to go (I did do the barrel, same bake setup and whatnot) I finally fired up Unity, which to my surprise actually just… worked. It did create the project in my home folder which was a bit annoying though. Dragging and dropping the exported fbx files was a breeze, and again to my surprise all the UV’s and textures just… worked? Definitely not used to this. After downloading and importing a few assets from poly pizza (a beetle and a guitar) I made a little scene.

I only thought it would be appropriate to recreate a real scene of John Lennon recording one of his many tunes with George Martin accompanying him on the mixing desk. Here is the final result:

Over all this tutorial was done without much issue after I got Unity to install properly, there were a few moments of frustration with my textures in Blender on the desk, however that is purely because I accidentally overwrote the wrong image while using the texture painter and there was nothing really to learn from that other than double check what image you are drawing onto before using the paint bucket tool.

Another point of learning is baking textures and lighting. All of my texture exports had lighting baked in which made them look wrong/bad in Unity because, well, the lighting was pre-baked. This is something to look out for in the future, especially when dealing with procedural textures.