Kristen Powers
Independent Learning Requirement: Unity Tutorial

Throughout the semester I have been referring to Lynda.com and Youtube to help me with my Unity projects and to try to trouble shoot things that don't work. I completed the Unity 5: 3D Essential Training that you posted on to blackboard. It was for the most part helpful, but I actually found sometimes it went more in detail that I actually needed and it tended to confuse me a bit more. However, it was a great way to get to know the program and see where tools were located.

The Unity Essentials class was broken up into different segments. The basic information is what helped me the most. I used both the notes on blackboard and the first Unity video to  help me set up my first project. I did not know what you could set it up to import standard packages right when you are setting up your project. At first I imported all the standard assets individually when I was in the project. This made life a lot easier going forward with projects.

I also looked to the tutorial to help me import the mesh for both a Maximo character and for my 3D scan of Eric for one of my projects. Some of the assets I imported within my first few projects also came with a mesh that was separate from the actual asset. It was not importing correctly, and this was partially because I was not looking in the correct place within my project and I was kind of disorganized. Looking for the textures area and being able to organize it all really helped. Also, this showed me how to bring in a texture from outside websites. I tried this for my first project and successfully did it, but I did not like how it looked so I ended up not using it.

For my first project I also played around with lighting to make it look more realistic with shadows. At first my skybox was actually pretty dark and the shadows on the horses did not seem realistic, but after watching the segment on lighting I was able to make the shadows look realistic.

This class also helped me with setting colliders. I was not grasping this in class so I watched the videos over to help me with my scene that had people dancing to thriller and a zombie that walks and triggers everything. I was able to successfully create box colliders that went around the zombie. I met with you to go over this a bit more, but after we met I also looked more into this through the videos to make sure I fully understood it. I needed to add audio clips that also went off by a trigger, so I learned how to create box colliders around that and actually successfully have the scene animate. I also watched a video a side from this to look at helping me with playmaker, but I did not find it to be helpful. It went way to far into detail and I felt it lost the beginning steps, which were actually what I was confused on.

***Aside from taking this class, I also watched the Autopano tutorial that I believe Paul posted. I found autopano to actually be pretty easy. I like it a lot better than video stitch and my video turned out pretty good. One thing I noticed is that when it goes into giga it is just a still image, so if you want to scroll though to a spot where there may be ghosting to fix in giga, you need to scroll to that spot in autopano video and then click edit and it will show up in giga at the spot you were at in video. This makes all the difference when trying to combat ghosting!