Intro to Unity 3D Physics: Helicopters

To start off our Heli physics project we need to get a few things setup first.  Lets take a few minutes and get our Unity Project set up and lets install the Indie-Pixel framework to help us automate laborious tasks. 

The Indie-Pixel framework comes with a bunch of small tools and resources that help you kick start any new Unity project.  In this lecture we are going to get it installed and start to utilize some of the tools in our development.

Lets quickly discuss what we are going to do in this section.

In this lecture we are going to walk through the basics of using Darw.io.  If you already have experience using this software, then this will just be a review.

I want to review and talk about each of the individual components we are going to build for the Helicopter system.  Plus you will get to see how I typically layout my diagrams.

Lets do a quick review of what we are going to be covering throughout this section.  If you are already familiar with the Unity Rigidbody then this section will be a review for you.  You are more than welcome to skip it, but I would highly recommend watching the section on hovering.  Thanks!:-)

Everything physics related starts with the Rigidbody in Unity.  So we need to get some of the basics out of the way.  lets cover getting our Rigidbody set up.

One of the first components of physics and Unity's rigidbody is the force component.  We will use this quite a lot throughout this course so getting a better understanding of what it is and how to apply it to a rigidbody is key to being successful with physics in Unity.

The next component in the Physics world is the Torque component.  This allows us to rotate objects using forces.  By the end of this lecture you will know how to use torque with the Unity rigidbody.

Drag is the force that is produced when moving.  It is caused by the density of the air and the surface of the object moving through the air.  Its effect is a slowing of the object as it moves faster and faster through the dense air.  We will learn how to apply drag and how to control it based off of the speed of our object.

The weight of an object is very important to take into account as an object that is heavier will require more force and torque to move.  We will take a look at this component in this lecture.

In this lecture we are going to put everything together and make our flying saucer hover in one place, under the weight of gravity.

Now lets look at how we can make our rigidbody scripts a bit more modular by using inheritance.

Lets take a second to talka bout the items we are going to cover in this section.

To start our Helicopter system we need to get the input from the user flying our helicopter.  So lets focus on getting the initial scripts stubbed in.

Now lets focus on getting input from the Keyboard.

Lets keep working through our Keyboard Inputs.

Lets keep working through our Keyboard Inputs.

Lets keep working through our Keyboard Inputs.

Lets conclude our Keyboard Input code.

Now lets turn our attention to the Xbox controller inputs.

Lets continue to work on our Xbox controller Input script

Lets finish up the xbox controller code and test to see how our xbox controller is working.

In order to ensure that we get only -1 to 1 values we need to clam our input values.  Lets do that in this lecture.

Lets conclude our Input system by creating a controller class that allow sues to select which input we want to use.

Lets talk about the things we are going to learn in this section.

Ok, so now lets stub in the Helicopter controller script so we can begin to add the major functionality to it.

You might have noticed that we have to drag and drop a lot of scripts onto our GameObjects, inside of Unity.  We we can use a C# attribute tag to make this easier on us. Lets take a look at this!

Lets take a bit to update our Base Rigidbody controller to help take care of tasks that every rigidbody controller will need.

Automation is key to making your systems easy to use for designers and artists.  So lets take a look at how we can fully automate the setup of a new helicopter.

All vehicles for the course are available in the resources of this lecture.  These models have no scripts attached, they are just the source art.

Lets do a quick review of what we are gong to cover in this Section.

To begin the process of getting our rotor blades blurred is to capture the actual blade form the unity scene.  Lets take a look at that process.

With our source content captured, we are now ready to set up the Houdini Network so we can automate the process of blurring the rotor blades.

To conclude this section we are going to take a look at how we can use a little bit of Python to make ass rendering of all the different levels of blur.