//Youtube – Shader – Smooth Outline – [Tutorial][C#]
As someone with very minimal shader experience in Unity still, this step by step tutorial is nice for just getting a feel for how shader code is setup while also creating a useful effect for certain art styles or attention drawing practices. It simply creates an outline around 3D objects of various color with variable width.
//Youtube – How to construct a simple First Person Controller with Camera Mouse Look in Unity 5
This first tutorial is a good example for setting up the most basic type of first person camera in Unity. Since the project I was using didn’t need a character at all and I was just attaching this directly to the camera, I needed to make some slight modifications to have it setup properly. This is because I didn’t have a parent object to apply the second type of rotation to. This just required me to set both rotations in both directions at the same time (since setting one and then the other to the exact same object had the second rotation constantly overriding the first).
This camera had a slight issue though where it moved relative to wherever the mouse starts on the screen. While I was just creating this camera controller for debugging purposes for an AR project, this would be an issue to investigate in the future if you actually wanted to use the controller for a game. Just implementing something simple using the mouse’s initial position relative to screen space somehow.
//Youtube – Houdini Tutorial – 3D Object Morphing using Open VDB Morph and SOP Solver
One of the finishing touches for my frog generator Houdini project that was suggested was morphing between several of the frog objects it is able to create in a single animation. I was already looking into converting some/all of it into VDB objects at some point to help clean up the joint connections in an interesting and organic way, so this VDB morphing seems like it should fit nicely with that.
//Youtube – 2D PATHFINDING – Enemy AI in Unity
This tutorial shows how to setup the general AStar package in a 2D Unity project. It goes over the basics of setting up an initial grid and getting a basic enemy AI that will make the enemy follow a target. It also has an example to setup your own simple AStar enemy AI script using AStar’s Pathfinding package.
This tutorial also cover the basics of setting up an enemy object with a graphics child object, flipping that graphic when the enemy should be going another direction, and just moving an enemy with physics and forces in general, instead of just updating position.
//Youtube – [Unity 2019 Tutorial] 01 Building the Base for Game – Complex Adventure Game With Unity
This set of tutorials as an in depth guide on the full process of setting up everything for a 2D adventure game in Unity. This gives a nice overview that can help me see what goes in to really bringing everything you create together to make the single, coherent game in Unity.
//This tutorial just shows a lot of basic ways to use the VDBcombine node to create an interesting bubbling effect all around a polygon surface. It is pretty simple and straight forward, so it is a nice entry into VDBs for Houdini.
//Youtube – Introduction to Houdini – Chapter 4- making digital assets
Making Digital Assets in Houdini seems to be a core part of creating a procedural model generator, so this tutorial gets into the very basics of setting one of these up.
The practice used here is that you create a Null object off to the side where you “Edit the Paramter Inteferface” under the settings of the node (the gear icon). You select the type of values you want to vary (floats, ints, ramps, vectors, colors, etc.) and add those to this Null object. Specifiying a range here can be helpful to inform the user of useful values. You then “Copy Parameters” from this Null control node, and “Paste Relative Expression” to the nodes/variables that they make sense. This way, when the Null control node has its values changed, they will directly correlate with changing the designated value within your network of nodes.
//Microsoft – => operator (C# Reference) Youtube – C# Tutorial 13 LINQ Extension Methods
I was working on a tutorial for GPU Instancing and dynamic batching a while ago to look into some ways to visually instantiate a lot of objects in Unity without overloading the computer and there was a lot happening in the code I was unfamiliar with. The biggest parts that stood out were the ” => ” operator along with some list and array methods.
The => operator was used within a list method called “Select”, so I started looking into both of those. The name of the => operator is the lambda operator. The simplest aspect seems to be that it’s a function with the parameters on the left side and the performing function on the right side. IT also seems to be used a lot with LINQ, which I am unfamiliar with.
//Vimeo – Jeff’s Top 10 Features of H17 | Jeff Wagner | Houdini Illume Webinar
This video was suggested to me as a useful reference for possibly aligning and snapping objects together. I am looking for a way to properly connect objects together for my frog generator tool so I can build the frog out of all its separate pieces.
//Youtube – Copy Object to Primitive Center
This simple tutorial is another way to project copies of objects onto the surface of another object. I came across this working on a separate part of my Houdini project, but this will come in handy very soon so I just wanted to document it.