The First Steps

Now my usual routine before heading into a new thing (whether it a job, education or a holiday) is to thoroughly research it first, and in the case of this course, even start learning a few things before I get started.

Firstly came Maya. I've never used it, the interface and tools looked clunky to me. I was too used to the minimal interface found on Lightwave software so I just never tried it until I had to...of course now I have to. So I looked around for tutorials across the internet, references and tips, and found two rather fabulous books on the subject of modelling for game environments. I am currently reading through them both and theyre helping me immensely, starting from the basics and leading up to more advanced structures.

You can find them both on Amazon here:

http://amzn.to/oBH7WV

http://amzn.to/oYPiNF

Next up came learning the game engine I'd be using through the course, which happened to be Unity 3D ( http://unity3d.com/ ). Now as far as I know, there are no amazing books for this software, which meant I had to resort to online tutorials and quite a bit of messing around to figure everything out. I even had to go about learning some of its very own type of Javascript (which was just fine, I dont know the regular Javascript anyway).

So to put a long story short, I have learnt some of the basic parts of the game engine and modelling in Maya, at least enough to produce a simple game. Behold the screencaps of my efforts!