Unity 3D & Maya: Create & Submit Art to Unity Asset Store

In our first lecture we took a look at the Unity Asset Store and went over the latest user stats for Unity3D ecosystem. Please Download Your Free Version of Unity 3D: http://unity3d.com/unity/download

In this lecture we talked about which program is best choice for modeling our toon character and why. Please Download Your Free 30 Day Trial: http://www.autodesk.com/products/maya/free-trial

We will take a closer look at the hand sketched toon character to figure out what is the best way to break it up into simple shapes for modeling.

Lets quickly go over the very basics in Maya, such as how to create and extrude basic shapes, move and rotate them. How to pick which viewport you want to work in as well as how to rotate your scene to get a different perspective.

We first setup our image plane drawing as a reference and then moved on to modeling an eyeball!

In this lesson we took our eyeball mesh and created top and bottom eyelids. We also learned how to use xRay setting while modeling on top of the reference image.

In this lesson we modeled the nose by using the basic torus shape and extruding the edge. We then learned how to insert more edge loops and hide one sided polygons.

In this lesson we learned how to duplicate and bridge two shapes together forming a head and an open mouth. We then continued to move our points around until they matched with the reference image in the side view.

Next, we attached our floppy nose to the head and did some minor clean up. We covered how to split points using the Chamfer tool, as well as how to merge points together.

In this lesson we modeled our character's tongue, as well as the top and bottom teeth.

We duplicated the eyeball mesh and turned it into character's body. We also learned how to use the Slice tool to create additional points. We ended by taking the basic cone shape and using it as our stinger.

We Continued with modeling the foot, then creating top and bottom leg cylinders.

We finished bridging the leg parts and learned how to use the mirror geometry tool to clone our leg to the other side.

Next, we organized our layers and started on modeling the cartoon hand based on a second image reference in the top viewport.

We finished modeling the hand and started on the arm.

In this lesson we finished setting up the arm. After that, we mirrored the arm to the other side.

We finished this section by modeling the wings, then cleaned up and organized our scene in the outliner.

We quickly covered what is UV mapping, UV Sets, and how UV's are created. We also learned how to change our background color in our viewports.

In this lesson we opened our character in Maya 2016 and unwrapped a few parts to get familiar with the new UI changes.

We began by unwrapping our eyeball, tongue, mouth and nose.

We continued unwrapping our nose, head, teeth, and the wing.

In this lesson we unwrapped the body by aligning the points in a straight line for easier painting and then moved on to the stinger.

In this lesson we UV projected our legs and arms, then cloned the shapes and UV's to the other side.

Made a few simple tweaks to make the character even better!

In this lesson we began painting our texture by opening it in Photoshop. We also learned how to properly setup UV guidelines and layers to make our workflow fast and efficient.

We continued to paint various parts of the character in Photoshop.

In this lesson we took our time and reworked the body UV's in order to paint perfect stripes in Photoshop.

We finished our painting in Photoshop by creating our wing design.We then covered an important technique for checking our final mesh for any imperfections.

Lets take a quick look at Maya 2018 and see if anything has changed.

In this lesson we cleaned up our outliner and took a quick look at the rigging tools. We learned how to create new joints and then bind them to a mesh.

We learned the importance of Joint Orientation. Once you build and align all of your joints (before skin binding), make sure to freeze transformations (sets rotation values to 0) and apply "Orient Joint" tool under skeleton to fix any local axis issues. This will make sure we have perfect local joint rotations for when we begin to animate.

We began rigging the legs. We first created joints on one side and then mirrored them to the other side.

In this lesson we rigged our hands and arms, we also learned how to manually orient a joint’s local axes.

We rigged our eyeballs and eyelids next.

In this lesson we rigged our head.

In this lesson we created the body joints and linked all other joints to the center.

We learned how to create and setup symmetric joints for our wings.

We finished this section by cleaning up our outliner and testing the final rig.

In this lesson we created a flying loop animation, by setting up our character set and then animating each body part.

Here we addressed an issue with our wings and added some final touches to the flying animation.

In this lesson we created our attack animation cycle.

We created an idle animation.

We took a quick look at how to render our character with Mental Ray, and then exported our model with all the animations for Unity 3D.

We took a quick look at Unity 3D layout and imported our FBX file.

We setup lights and named our animations.

We learned how to setup the 360 degrees spin for our model while previewing the animations in game mode.

We added an ability to control our model via GUI buttons in Unity.

We tweaked our belly weights in Maya and fixed a couple small alignment issue as the final changes.

We learned how to create a normal map to add a little extra detail to our texture.