Prototyping: Creating a cell phone flashlight in Unity

Every so often a student will come to me asking how to create a specific asset for their game, and in helping them work through the process of creation, I realize that it would be a good subject for a class tutorial. The guides that come from these situations are usually very quickly thrown together and utilize polygon primitives. The code might not be the cleanest, but it's a good starting point for a concept asset. 

An updated introduction to UVs in Maya

This is a more recent rendition of the introduction to UVs I wrote a number of years ago. While the original focused more on the fundamentals, this guide discusses newer tools that have been added to Maya in more recent versions. Note that the final section of this guide references Maya Bonus Tools, which is loaded by default on the computers where I teach. If you need them for your own version of Maya, they can be found here: Maya Bonus tools 2014-2017.

Finally, the original documentation I wrote can be found here.

Introduction to UVs in Maya

This is another example of some very early documentation that I wrote for a slightly younger audience than normal. I believe this dates from 2011-12, but mostly goes over the fundamentals of UVing, so should still be valid today. I've also posted an updated version of this documentation that covers newer UV editor tools which can be found here.

Modeling and texturing plants in Maya

This is one of the earliest bits of documentation I ever wrote. It's interesting to go back and see how things have changed over the years. Also worth noting that this was written for a somewhat younger audience than my normal fare, so if things seem a bit overly simplified, that's the reason why.

Overview of Unity's "new" UI system

Occlusion culling in Unity

Basic Procedural Generation in Unity

Intro to Unity's Mecanim system

Just over a year ago I was given the opportunity to create a course for animation students at the school where I teach. What I ultimately settled on was a primer on Unity, with a specific focus on how the engine handles animation. My goal was to give the animation students a strong enough foundation with the basics of a popular game engine that they would be confident enough to apply for game jobs as well as their more traditional fare. This is just one of many guides that I wrote for them.

Enjoy! 

A guide to working with RivalTheory Rain behavior trees [warning: gigantic]

This, I believe, is the longest bit of documentation I've ever written in a single go. All told it's 52 pages. My goal with this guide was to give a truly useful overview of Rain for absolute beginners. Learning to use Rain was supremely difficult for me in the beginning, and a big reason was due to the fact that there was very little documentation out there. I'm particularly proud of this one because the vast majority of it came from my own trial and error.