Add Blender to your Unity game development projects to unlock new possibilities and decrease your dependency on third-party creators

Key Features

• Discover how you can enhance your games with Blender
• Learn how to implement Blender in real-world scenarios
• Create new or modify existing assets in Blender and import them into your Unity game

Book Description

Blender is an incredibly powerful, free computer graphics program that provides a world-class, open-source graphics toolset for creating amazing assets in 3D. With Mind-Melding Unity and Blender for 3D Game Development, you'll discover how adding Blender to Unity can help you unlock unlimited new possibilities and reduce your reliance on third parties for creating your game assets.

This game development book will broaden your knowledge of Unity and help you to get to grips with Blender's core capabilities for enhancing your games. You'll become familiar with creating new assets and modifying existing assets in Blender as the book shows you how to use the Asset Store and Package Manager to download assets in Unity and then export them to Blender for modification. You'll also learn how to modify existing and create new sci-fi-themed assets for a minigame project. As you advance, the book will guide you through creating 3D model props, scenery, and characters and demonstrate UV mapping and texturing. Additionally, you'll get hands-on with rigging, animation, and C# scripting.

By the end of this Unity book, you'll have developed a simple yet exciting mini game with audio and visual effects, and a GUI. More importantly, you'll be ready to apply everything you've learned to your Unity game projects.

What you will learn

• Transform your imagination into 3D scenery, props, and characters using Blender
• Get to grips with UV unwrapping and texture models in Blender
• Understand how to rig and animate models in Blender
• Animate and script models in Unity for top-down, FPS, and other types of games
• Find out how you can roundtrip custom assets from Blender to Unity and back
• Become familiar with the basics of ProBuilder, Timeline, and Cinemachine in Unity

Who this book is for

This book is for game developers looking to add more skills to their arsenal by learning Blender from the ground up. Beginner-level Unity scene and scripting skills are necessary to get started.

Table of Contents

1. Melding Unity and Blender
2. Gathering Our Resources
3. Entering the Blender Zone for the First Time
4. Asset Assimilation: Returning to Unity
5. On the Level: Making Modular Scenery
6. Living It Up: Adding Fun with Animation
7. Prep Work: Materials, Grids, and Snapping
8. Laying Out the Level
9. Secret Weapon #1: Deploying ProBuilder
10. Secret Weapon #2: Animating with Timeline
11. We Could Be Heroes: Blender Character Modeling
12. It Was Rigged!: Character Rigging
13. Animation and Movement In-Game
14. Endgame: Adding Spit and Polish

About the Author

Spencer Grey is a native New Yorker who started making games by typing in source code from magazines (that used to be a thing!). Once upon a time he was Creative Director of Sesame Street’s Digital group where he would boss around Elmo and Big Bird. After that, he co-founded Electric Funstuff and for 15 years developed game ideas for companies like Scholastic, Sony, and Lego. Spencer has been a teacher, programmer, writer, and producer in the games industry. Mr. Grey is definitely not related to the grey aliens stored in Area 51. Definitely not. No way.