Three Powerful 3D Software from DAZ 3D - free!

Got this info about DAZ 3D from friend, have a quick look and as shown below quite surprised to find that they are offering 3 of their Powerful 3D software for free (only 2 shown in screen dump below as image too long) - that's DAZ Studio Pro 4.5, Bryce Pro 7 and Hexagon 2.5, WOW! 

I heard about the name Bryce ages ago, but to be honest never really paid much attention about it as I wasn't into 3D until started learning Unity recently.

Had a quick look at some of the demo videos and quite impressed with it's powerful features. Wonder how that fits into the Unity world? It's free any way, quick! Go and download it before the free offer ends!

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Unity 3D is more difficult than expected :-(

Time really flies... Just realised July almost passed and I haven't post anything for the whole July yet - this is probably the first time since started this blog last June...

My focus during end of June was on updating my 2 games. "Mespfi V1.01" is now live with the new Nextpeer V1.1.9 SDK, and "Where Is It Ver 1.02" been greatly enhanced with all images re-created.

July has been quite painful and challenging, as the learning curve for Unity 3D was a lot steeper than I expected.

First need to get familiar with the 3D interface - finding an object in the new 3D interface is still quite challenging, and still not quite use to the hundreds of options for different objects.

Next the concept of Material, Texture, Mesh, Prefab, ....etc, all quite new and don't think I can tell the difference or explain when should each of them be used yet.

Tried a few books, at first I started with "Unity iOS Game Development Beginner's Guide", but half way through it, the example no longer works and the author doesn't seem to respond to lots of questions been raised on the net. Also quickly browsed through "Unity iOS Essentials", but the content was a bit too advanced for beginner's like me. Finally settled with "Unity 3.x Game Development By Example - Beginner's Guide" and although the book doesn't focus on iOS as the previous two, the content is easy to understand/follow and more suitable for my level. Currently on chapter 10 and felt more confident now. If you are also interested in learning Unity 3D, would strongly recommend this book.

Still have a long way to go with Unity 3D, but the vision of able to publish games in 3D, and most importantly - not just limited to iOS platform, definitely worth all the effort!

As this path seems to slowly move away from Objective-C, start wondering if I should start another blog call "New 2 Unity 3D" ??

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Lots of fun with Unity 3D

While waiting for my 2nd game to be approved (submitted on 11/June) - which strangely takes longer than a week this time, I was wondering around looking for ideas and new stuffs. Then had a quick browse of this book "Beginning 3D Game Development with Unity" by Sue Blackman and I got hooked with Unity 3D!

Only spent about an hour or two, and I got a spinning sphere and cube running in 3D, amazing.

The most interesting part is it's ability to deploy to different platforms. I tried the Web one (shown above), Mac and also iOS. Except the iOS one needs some code change as the "OnMouseDown" function wasn't supported for iOS (haven't work out how to fix that yet :-P ), they all worked perfectly. I don't have an Android phone to test, otherwise would be perfect, all major platforms covered!

Still not quite used to the idea of coding everything in JavaScript, and the user interface is still quite tricky to manage (specially with moving the camera and objects around in different angles), but the vision that I can now lots of things in 3D and multiple platforms makes me really excited!

Although that would mean my previous knowledge with Cocoa, Objective-C and Cocos2D would not be of much use, still think that's something worth a try - let's see how it goes...

Remember - the 10000 hour rule!

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Can't get Unity3D 3.5 to work on my iPhone for XCode 4.3.1 [Updated]??

Unity 3D is having a special offer to download Unity3D 3.5 for free. I tried it, installed on my MacBook Pro. But can't get it to run properly on my iPhone 3GS, tried friend's iPhone 4, also same issue. I can see the splash screen comes up ok, but then it crashed, the screen dump is as below.

At first, this was with the demo project AngryBots. I thought may be it's too complicate, so I tried that tutorial from Ray Wenderlich. Even with a blank scene in a brand new project, it still crashed when I tried to run it on my iPhone.....

Any one got any idea how to fix that? Looks like 3D Game development is not as easy as I first thought...

[Update 02/04/2012]
After some research, actually most of time spent in learning about transferring my developer profile from MacBook to old box (OS X 10.6.7 with XCode 4.0), I was finally able to get the demo project AngryBots running on my iPhone 3GS (iOS 4.3.5), yeah!

Lucky I left the phone with old version as if I have updated it to iOS 5, probably can't get it to run with XCode 4.0. I can understand Apple would like to push for everyone to upgrade all their devices to the latest version, but to be more flexible, there should be options which allows developers to "down grade" their iOS device to older version, plus should also allow XCode 4 on Snow Leopard to run latest XCode (4.3.1), well, that's a different topic...

So, while waiting for Unity to fix the issue with XCode 4.3.1, at least I got a backup work around to play with. Who says those old boxes are useless? :-)

Screen dump from iPhone 3GS shown below:

[Update 25/04/2012]

I think the link about the problem has been updated to this link

It says:

All these issues were fixed by Unity 3.5.1f2 release and we highly recommend upgrade to it. 

This release also adds iPad3 (aka The New iPad) high-res splashscreen and icon support. 

[Update 27/04/2012]

Tested with Unity 3.5.1 and confirmed it's working ok now. Now, how do you do Hello World in Unity?

Damn, a lot more new things to learn....

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