CG Cookie has upgraded to a new custom gallery system which will provide more of a community experience while viewing the gallery and site. We’ve been able to cram in a few more features on the tail end of this update that I would like to take you through.

Updated Style

First and foremost, the gallery and user dashboard have been given a facelift. We felt the previous style of the gallery was already showing its age and so we spent a while on the design to make everything cleaner, easier to read, simpler to navigate, and all around easier on the eyes.

Previous/Next Image Browsing

Perhaps the most requested feature, when browsing the gallery you can now navigate to the previous or next image in the gallery right from the image page.

Following / Followers

Twitter started this trend and it turns out it is a good trend to follow You can now follow other users work, to be notified when they post new images. This is a great way to view updates from your favorite artists on the network.

Expanded Profiles

Each member of CG Cookie now has an enhanced profile page to showcase their artwork per site which include social links and information about them. The goal of this page is to provide a landing page to showcase your artwork to friends, family and businesses. From this page you have the ability to view image states, view users you’re following and those followers of your work.

Badges

Another part of the expanded profiles is a full badge system! Users will now receive badges for various things, such as being a Citizen member, winning a contest and others. A full list of the available badges will be coming soon!

Newsletter Sign-up

It’s now easier than ever to sign up for our various CG Cookie network newsletters. You may now manage your newsletter subscription straight from your user dashboard on CG Cookie.

Love an Image

If you see an image you love, you can let the author know by clicking the heart icon below the image.

Upload image status

Authors now have the ability to mark an image as in-progress or finished during the upload process. This will help direct the type of comments and feedback the author is looking to receive.

Expanded Control Panel

The side control panel has received an upgrade as well. You will now receive updates from users that you’re following and there is a new tab for your favorite images.

We are certain there are a few lingering bugs on the site. If you happen to find some please be sure to send us an e-mail to support@cgcookie.com. Thank you again for hanging with us on the site!

The Unity Tower Defense Tutorial

Everybody loves Tower Defense games (or should), so why not make one of your own? In this series, we’ll go from start to finish creating an entire Tower Defense game in Unity, and oh yes, it will be great! We will be taking a very modular approach- building seperate parts bit by bit, then bringing everything together in the end. First up is the foundation of our game- an AutoTurret!

Be warned, this is bound to get complex- if things are not making sense, make sure you have already completed the “Lunar Lander” series of tutorials here on Unity Cookie.

What is covered in this tutorial:

• Automatic Targeting
• Firing on a Target
• Trail Rendering
• Hierarchical Transform Control

Unity Game

Here it is, the top requested additions to the Lunar Lander tutorial! First we’ll go over setting up a functional Fuel Meter, and make it look good while we’re at it. Then we’ll add persistant data- keeping gameobjects and info between scenes without using PlayerPrefs, a really handy trick. As part of that, we’ll also add a “DJ” to consistantly play music throughout your game, a definite must-have. Lastly, we’ll fix up your camera to follow the player properly.

Enjoy, and thanks for all the comments!

What is covered in this video tutorial

• Scripting to GUITextures
• Color Lerping
• Keeping Objects and info between Levels
• Smooth Camera Follow/look-at

Adding Audio and Score to your Unity Game

, and here we fix that, tie up a few loose ends, and “make it pretty”. If there is demand, there could certainly be another series with  more, and more advanced, tutorials, detailing all sorts of extra functionality- but we don’t want this series to drag on forever What you have learned in these 6 tutorials will give you the background to build much more than just what I taught- I really look forward to seeing some Webplayer builds of everyone’s “final project”, and especially to see what customizations you might have made!

What is covered in this video tutorial

• More PlayerPrefs Techniques
• Keeping Track of score between levels
• Adding audio in several unique ways
• GUI Textures and GUI Text

Learning GUI Menus in Unity

Finally, it’s time to add a GUI to your unity game! We’ll go over the Unity GUI system, how to load different levels, more script connections, and the super useful “PlayerPrefs” which allows you to store game info between games. If that’s not enough, you will even learn how to control time- check it out!

What is covered in this video tutorial

• Unity GUI Buttons
• Unity GUI “States”
• Stopping and Starting Time
• Storing and retrieving variables in PlayerPrefs

Unity Scripting: Scripting the Player Controller

The most Learning-full Mine Lander tutorial yet! You’ll set up the level to use collisions, explode the player ship, activate landing pads, and more. To do all this, we’ll be learning a lot of new scripting methods including getting collision info, coroutines, accessing scripts on other objects, spawning new Game Objects- all skills you will need in many other cases, so get to it!

What is covered in this tutorial:

• - Coroutines
• - Instantiate new Game Objects
• - Accessing scripts as a Component
• - OnCollisionEnter for getting detailed collision info
• - Swapping materials and colors via script
• - Destroying a Game Object

Play Lunar Lander:

What you’ll learn

We are going to get introduced to projectors in Unity. Projectors can be used for a variety of things. From blob character shadows, simulating a character walking under a light, graphitti on walls, or weapon damage.

In this tutorial Justin is going to walk you through the uses for character shadows without a dynamic light.

Unity Scripting: Scripting the Player Controller

In this tutorial, we will finally get that Lander pod moving, and looking pretty! You’ll learn how to do some simple, but very useful, scripting, including accessing components, physics, and inspector-editable variables. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have your ship flying about the level, with particle effects to match.

Also, I’ve decided to go ahead and provide all the real, much awesomer, painstakingly-hand-crafted models that will be in the full Mine Lander game once I launch it. You can even feel free to use these models however you like, just please credit me is all I ask. Of course, if you created your own, more power to you!

What is covered in this tutorial:

• - Creating a Javascript file
• - Attaching scripts to objects
• - Scripting for physics-based controls
• - Attaching external components to your script
• - Axis-based input via scripting
• - Other scripting-oriented useful tips

Play Lunar Lander:

Hello and welcome to this project workflow tutorial! 

Unless you are an artist or team member that is actively involved in a studio production environment, chances are you find the requirements and good practices for a project workflow to be a complete mystery. It is not uncommon to see new, or even intermediate Blender users with little, to no idea how to efficiently structure a project. This can cause unnecessary delays and challenges during production.

Before getting down to it, I would also like to take a moment to give a small pitch for our Citizen Membership. If you like this guide and want to take it with you for easy reading or reference then sign-up for a Citizen account and download the print-ready PDF to take with you on your iPad, Kindle or phone! Citizen also gives you access to download the source files for all our tutorials and it includes exclusive tutorials you can only view with a Citizen pass.

This tutorial, or editorial of sorts, is meant to try and shed some light on a few things you can do to help make your production more successful; regardless of your project is or who is involved.

Efficiently structuring a production, and the project workflow is absolutely key to succeeding with larger projects. If your project is not a solo project, and instead you’re working with a team then this is even more crucial!

An effective project workflow, or production workflow, not only helps you get the job done faster but it helps you produce better work. You will enjoy the process more and it leaves you with a project that is easier to navigate several years down the road; even if the person looking at the project was not on the original team.

Every project is different and the workflow must be adapted to fit that particular project as best as can be. However, there are a few things that are universal to all projects. In the below text you will find a few of my thoughts on these things, along with some of the techniques I have found to make a successful project workflow during our productions here at the CG Cookie Studio.

I have attempted to break the key parts of a production or project workflow into five components. These are Project Roles, Team Communication, File Structure and Naming Conventions, Asset Management, and Finishing the Project! Let’s take a look at each one of these in turn.

#1 – Project Roles

Being part of the Blender Community, I believe many of us have this idealized picture of a large group of people all coming together and communally working to produce something awesome without a centralized direction or project lead. This is a great mental image but in reality, particularly when it comes to your beloved project that has been stewing in your mind for years it just doesn’t work.

One of the first things you should do before you produce a single project asset is define team member roles. Determine who is doing what, which roles need to be filled and figure out how you can best make use of the skills your team brings to the table.

Below are some example roles which you should be looking to fill. Granted, depending on the size or type of project you may also include User Interface Designers, Concept Artists, Marketing, and others. The exact roles for your team may vary, the important thing is that you define them.

Example Primary Roles:

1. Project Lead - the person responsible for making project-wide choices and keeping the team on task and motivated.
2. Art Director – the person that takes charge of the look and feel of the project. On smaller teams this person may also help direct marketing.
3. Production Artist(s) and respective Leads - these people are charged to ensure all project assets are completed to spec. Depending on the spec of your project, this may be broken into several areas such as: Character Artist Lead and Environment Artist Lead. 
1. Environment Artist: Responsible for all hard surface modeling and environment layout. This includes object modeling and lighting in most cases.
2. Character Artist: As you can imagine all things characters. Clothing, accessories and textures.
4. Animation Lead – the person that keep tabs on all animation to ensure quality and consistency
5. Tech artists / Engineers - these people are responsible for making sure everything actually works. This can boil down to shader development, optimization, custom tool creation and staring at lines and lines of codes for months on end.

When you have these roles defined, stick to them! Within the production environment, it is crucial each member fills their role to the best of their ability; this includes everything from the producer keeping the project going to the asset artists pumping out quality work. Doing this helps everyone stay on track and keep moving towards project completion.

Aside from making the best use of available skills, this also helps to avoid work overlap and too much head-butting. It is very common for new directors/producers to try and always be nice and let everyone do what they want, but this nearly always results in one things: you getting walked all over and the team getting nothing done. Let’s face it, this is your project and it should be done the way you want it to be.

#2 – Team Communication

I cannot stress just how important team communication is…personally I believe it is more important than your entire team, hardware, location, and everything else combined. The only reason this isn’t the #1 key is because the roles can determine aspects of the communication. Without good team communication your project will start to fall apart even before you begin. Good team communication should be a lot like your neighbors annoying, clanging, noisy machine that is always spouting steam! It’s always there, constantly makes a racket and refuses to be turned off.

The first step to good team communication is to put together a group of people that actually like to communicate. If each member of your team is off gallivanting with no regard for the rest of the group your project is doomed to fail. Every person on the team should actively contribute to team discussions and updates while also following the project lead. It is their job to help guide the project through completion and it is everyone else’s job to fulfill their role.

There are many different ways teams choose to communicate, if you’re looking for some new options then here’s a brief list to ease the process:

1. Skype - this works great for active discussions, particularly if the group chats are used to keep all members up to date
2. Wunderkit - the newest member of the 6WunderKinder family, this software is a great team to-do list and management application
3. BaseCamp - this tool is renowned for great team management while offering a wealth of tools
4. email - while boring, email is tried and true but it takes a very good team to not lose track of messages and to make sure everyone is on the email list. Use mailing lists to help solve this problem.

In the end, the most important thing is to simply keep the communication going!

#3 – File Structure and Naming Convention

If there’s a single thing I would consider a pet peeve of mine in the production process, it is bad or inconsistent file structures and naming conventions. When I’m knee-deep in a project, the last thing I want to do is spend hours searching for the files Sneaky Tom sent me because I don’t know what they’re called or where they’re at. Hours may be an exaggeration, okay fine it’s a huge exaggeration, but you get the point. If each team member follows a consistent naming convention and file structure it will be much easier for each member to pick up where others left off or make use of files from other people on the team.

You can use most any structure and naming convention as you like, just so long as it’s consistent and everyone sticks to it!

An example project directory structure:

• Project Root
• assets
• models
• textures
• output
• final_renders
• sequence
• sequence_comp
• scenes
• 01
• 02

This is merely an example and could be broken down further for specific projects. For example, you might further separate assets into characters and environments.

#4 – Asset Management

Right up there in importance with file structure and naming convention, is asset management. While working in a team environment it is crucial that every member know exactly where each and every file exists that is pertinent to them.

There are many different ways you can manage your assets, but I highly recommend using something like Dropbox with shared folders to keep everyone in sync and on the same page. The requirements of your project may bring to light other challenges for asset management, but Dropbox or some of the other software is a good place to start.

1. Dropbox -  an automatic file syncing tool that allows for shared folders between team members; also includes file change history in case of emergencies.
2. SugarSync – another automatic file syncing utility with much the same feature set as Dropbox but with wider range of customizations.
3. SVN – a version control utility that lets team members check in and out from a central source. It is great for coding projects but not so good for animation projects due to file sizes.

#5 – Finish the Project

This sounds like a silly thing to bring up in a workflow guide, but this is probably one of the hardest things to do. We’ve all seen and been around the start-up projects where everyone is excited, anxious and pumped to get started. Only to find out months and sometimes just weeks later that the project is on hold… Somebody is upset at somebody else, this other person won’t answer e-mails, and the motivation to work on this awesome project instead of going streaking on Saturday night isn’t winning.

If you follow the above project guidelines you will be making the first steps towards a successful project. By making communication a priority, defining team roles and managing your assets well you can not only give the project a successful start but be well on your way to finishing the project and going on vacation!

All vector artwork done by the excellent Yuanden

Importing 3D assets and building levels in Unity

Welcome back to the Lunar Lander series of tutorials on unitycookie.com! In this Unity video we’ll be going over how to import all your custom assets, and use them to build up your game levels in Unity. We’ll also take a look at specialized mesh colliders for complex shapes, ambient lighting, faking a background, and few other nifty things that will really help with this, and future, game making.

Also, I’ve decided to go ahead and provide all the real, much awesomer, painstakingly-hand-crafted models that will be in the full Mine Lander game once I launch it. You can even feel free to use these models however you like, just please credit me is all I ask. Of course, if you created your own, more power to you!

What is covered in this tutorial:

• - Importing custom meshes and textures
• - Creating materials for your custom assets
• - Advanced use of colliders for complex shapes
• - Ambient light
• - Building your Lunar Lander levels
• - Adding your level to the “Build” menu

Play Lunar Lander: