Introducing the game environment

I'm ready to begin construction of my game Unity. I've imported in my assets and tagged my normal maps as normal maps. I've set the size of all my FBXs to one, and turned on generate light map UVs. I'm ready to start bringing assets into this scene, and I'll begin with the gallery itself. I'll pick the 04_01_gallery fbx and there's two ways to bring this in. The first is to drag from the assets into the scene, placing this arbitrarily.

The second is to drag it into the hierarchy, and this places it in the exact place it was in Maya. I'll choose the second option as I want this placed where I had created it. It makes a prefab, and we can tell it's a prefab because of the blue writing here in that hierarchy. We can see in here all the different objects are also prefabs within that gallery mesh. I'm also going to do a little bit of cleanup here in my meshes folder. In the meshes, there's a materials folder. And these re the materials as they came across a sign in Maya. I'll double-click on them.

And there's all the different materials that were in my scene plus Lambert one, the default material in Maya. And a few extras here and there. Picking any one of these materials shows that it's not really formed yet. It's a flat, diffuse shader, simply having an RGB color and a slot for a texture. Later, we'll go through and actually put in specular properties, and put in the normal maps and the materials. For now, though, the materials are assigned in the correct places for Maya. What I'm going to do is to put these in my Materials folder, so my Meshes folder stays clean.

I'll pick the top one, scroll down, and hold Shift and pick the bottom, and then drag them over into the hierarchy here under Assets. Choosing the materials folder and letting go. Now the materials folder in meshes is blank and I can delete it by hitting Delete. My meshes folder is clean, containing just meshes. The meshes are still assigned their materials but the materials are in my materials folder. I may end up making other materials later. So I'd rather have my materials separated from the meshes folder. If it seems like I'm being a bit of a neat freak about the organization, it's worth it.

Like I've said previously, it's very easy for a game to have thousands of objects and materials and assets very quickly. And we need to be able to find them. And, more importantly, multiple team members need to be able to find all of the different pieces and not have to go hunting around. My mesh is imported and now in the Inspector when I select that object in the hierarchy, I can see it has a Transform, where it is, and an Animator controller that was created automatically. I can remove that component if I need, because this is a non-animating mesh.

I don't really want the building to get up and walk around. But an Animator Controller is placed automatically. So if we need to bring this into Mecanim to create an animation or behavior tree. We can. What I'll do, is to select it and then click in my screen window and Press F and there's my gallery. I brought my pieces in. And I can see here, especially by turning off textured plus wire, and choosing just textured, that the objects are in but their materials are not showing yet.

I do need to tune these up, but my scene is created and is the right size. A quick way to verify if this is imported correctly is by the player controller. I'll select it and drag it over into this scene. Pressing F to focus shows us that, well unfortunately, this poor guy has his head through the roof. That's a minor deal. I'll pull him down, but more importantly, the default player controller in Unity is two meters high. So, as a rough gauge for size, this is a very tall person. About 6 foot 7. Does it look right in the scene, and the answer is yes.

I'll compare it visually to the doors and it looks pretty good. As another gauge, these railings are modeled in Maya at three feet high, so for the controller to be probably a little tall for the railings looks about right. Always check when you're bringing things in if they came across correctly. Make sure that scale works and that they're placing in where you want. Now that I've got this in here, I can configure my player controller and start to get my environment in shape. Then I can start to work on materials and lights.

But getting that first scene in and verifying the size and placement is really crucial.