One of the things I want to highlight when writing this blog is the 3rd party plugin's available from the Unity Asset Store I'm using. These plugins are generally made by other independent developers and can greatly increase you productivity leaving you more time to do what you really want to do - make your game.
I got a great tool for recently called Archimatix. It's a node-based parametric modeling editor extension that pretty much turn's your unity editor into a fully fledged 3d editing suite. I gave it a whirl this week and decided to build a fortress for Brides of Vampira and in particular the first fortress you'll encounter a top Grim Mountain here's a work in progress screen shot.
Archimatix Nodes
With Archimatix you don't actually make models in the usual traditional way i.e. you don't directly create polygons. Instead you create 2d shapes and extrude / lathe them using nodes. Each node has various parameters, width height etc which you alter to form a 3d model.
Archimatix comes with many different nodes, there's nodes that repeat objects, nodes that place column's on corners etc, they are mostly driven by a 'Plan' which is just a 2d object that defines a layout of the vertices and you can feed the output of these nodes into other nodes to create complex models. At first the node layout looks quite complex, but once you get used to it, it makes modeling complex structures much easier / faster than traditional 3d modelling methods.
Archimatix Expressions
The real power comes in the form of expressions. In the image below you'll notice the orange line feeding into the RepeaterTool. This is joined to the 'width' field from another node. This means that when I change that width the size of the RepeaterTool will also change and vice-a-versa.
Underneath each field is an expression field. In this size field I added the code 'Actual_Bay=size-1', so when the size field changes the 'Actual_Bay' field will update! so you could go 'Actual_Bay=size/2*cells' for example.
This means you can have a complex model that when setup correctly you change the height for example and it automatically add more floors to a building! Amazing stuff.
For me as a programmer, being able to program my 3d models, is something I'd never thought about, but trust me it's a massive time saver it means you can try thing's out without having to redo the whole model.
Anyhow I highly recommend it to anyone making games - check it out
Archimatix on the Unity AssetStore
Till next time!
Taz Cebula
