Unity and The Butterfly Effect

Happy almost Thanksgiving everyone!

The clips I have this week are made from a program called Unity which I may or may not have talked about before. It is a game development program which is free to use and offers a pretty professional interface for beginners like me to get their feet wet in developing 3D games. With the release of Unity 4 a lot of new features have been added, so the developers teamed with Passion Pictures and Nvidia to create an animated short showing off the goods. Passion Pictures is primarily an animation studio, unfamiliar with working with game development software. The team at Unity knew this and wanted to see how their technology could be pushed in the hands of an animation studio outside of gaming and, well, the results are nothing short of fantastic! I was particularly intrigued by the highly detailed facial animations, created entirely by the free technology which exists with Unity. There's a lot of technical talk that I can't even begin to understand in the Making Of video... however next semester I'm enrolled in Game Dev and Technologies which plans to work with Unity in creating games so hopefully I'll begin to understand some of it. I'm extremely excited to begin learning this incredibly powerful tool for the industry I plan to work in.

And if you really enjoyed the video, I suggest watching this Making Of trailer, which shows the challenges and triumphs of each scene:

Lap Slap App

Tomorrow I'm excited to be a part of the Park School's "Pitch It!" idea pitch session. Cody and I will be presenting a game that we developed last year that is in its prototype stages. I don't want to talk too much about it (we don't have our idea protected yet) but it is a 2D game developed in Unity, a 3D engine. I am extremely proud of the work we have put into it and truly believe that the game will be a success if it can make it to the android and mobile markets. Working on this game was my first real foray into the world of animation and motion graphics. One of the members and I worked on getting hands to animate. We began by looking for models of hands, or the assets of such, to work with and manipulate in Unity. What we found nearly blew our minds...getting hands to animate in 3D space was much more difficult than we anticipated. I'd never heard of rigging before this point and even now it sounds like an incredibly daunting task (but I really hope to get into that sort of thing). So we switched over to 2D animation, which I was just beginning to learn (and still am). My fellow art designer and I used Photoshop to construct the sprite sheets which were then loaded into the game and animated through code. It was fun and in the end I am proud of the prototype we built for the game. We hope to develop it further over the course of the year, if, i mean WHEN we are chosen by the panel of Park alumni. Here is a sneak peek screenshot of the up and coming big hit to the mobile markets: The Lap Slap App