[missmoocodes]

3D Learning Resources

updated: Jun/25*

This is not coding related, I know, but gamedev-learning related enough to be here! :) I've been asked about learning resources for 3D modeling and tried to make a list of tutorials I could remember - I'm highlighting the ones I've tried myself but I've heard good things about all of these. This list is low poly focused but the knowledge can be applied for anything else. 

I haven't been doing this for long - I started learning 3D a year ago and have been ever since but as a 2D artist the technical side of it still overwhelms me a lot. I've gone nowhere near animation yet but I've been adventuring with low poly quite a lot (which you can check out in #OceanHeart (image above) and #GemuNoGemu, - I also put up assets pics in a Trello here as well as stuff on my website). I mainly use Maya (now Maya LT) but I've been trying to tackle Blender too. Here are some helpful goodies I've found:

Maya:

I started learning Maya with this series of videos on youtube by Misterh3d. I watched through units 1-7 and it's a pretty great introduction! Nicely paced, covers a bunch you gotta know.

A series on Low poly for game assets using Maya 2015

Blender:

Blender 3D - Noob to Pro: for the basics! :)

And another Blender course for beginners

The super popular Secrets to Creating Low Poly Illustrations On Blender - great intro to making some low poly goodness :)

Blender Cookie - CGCookie is a website that has a bunch of awesome tutorials (loads for free) on many softwares, including Unity. Take a look at this Low Poly Game Asset Creation tutorial.

Some character creation tutorials by ward7299

Bunch of really cool low poly tutorials here by Manuel Graphics!

A Minecraft character modeling and texturing tutorial

All things 3D/low poly:

Creating a low poly treasure island

PigArt: rad speedart/timelapses of adorable looking low poly art, lots to learn from watching these :)

Digital Tutors has loads of 3D modeling tutorials, some free some paid. Tried a few of those and they're pretty cool!

Cool Misc stuff:

Blender Cycles rendering introduction

Creating flat colored low poly art. This is how I currently color all assets for Gemu (I used to color using materials or vertex colors before because I can't stand UV unwrapping but this is a pretty easy alternative) 

Please do check the Polycount forum, so many cool references and useful info! Also do check their low poly thread :)

There's also reddit's /low_poly

Study Files:

Cocefi kindly uploaded a low poly model for download here :)

You can download models on Sketchfab! Here are some popular low poly ones

Lots of cool Cinema 4D project files for download here

Missmoo 3D:*

Streaming: I often stream some of my modeling on Oceanheart and I'm always happy to share what I know :)

My Sketchfab: I'll be uploading some models for download shortly here

This is how I texture my models for Oceanheart - I'm always sharing wip and processes in our devblog

Rad people making awesome 3D stuff:*

@PIXELATEDCROWN

@turnislefthome

@chickysprout

@metkis

@korigame

@GarretRandell

@IMPLODINGORACLE

@ultrakurtzwelle

@khalkeus3d

@AckkStudios

@q_dork

@andmish

@heatpenn

@dicey

@torahhorse

@mushbuh

This is it for now! :) I know it's short but I hope I can keep it growing - I'll add more stuff to it as I find other tuts (let me know if you have any suggestions!).

[missmoocodes]

Make all the tech!

So in early November a trip to the Science Museum in order to watch Interstellar happened and as usual I spent a good chunk of time going crazy in the museum shop wanting to buy all the things (seriously they have so much awesome stuff!).

That was when I found out about all the DIY electronic kits by Technology Will Save Us. They are a London based company that not only make gadget electronic kits you can build and code yourself, but also run workshops to teach you how to do that!

And their kits are all pretty rad! I'm so tempted to get that DIY Gamer kit :D you can basically build your own handheld console and program your own little games for it. Will definitely be giving this a try at some point.

For now though I have started with their DIY synth kit, as I secretly dream of having my own robot synth band. Here's a vine with bits of the assembling process and the final working synth:

[missmoocodes]

ShmOOp Oddity

So a couple more Friday Code nights happened...

(this was from yesterday! yummy belgian waffles at my favourite cafe place - a treat so I could handle implementing UI in Unity)

...and this is where ShmOOp is at so far!

Behold my start screen featuring a 5min logo and Unity's ugly buttons!

This was basically my first time making other screens and working on different scenes. Also setting things up and making my first build! Just a bit awkward but pretty straightforward I guess. This helped a lot (which again is the tutorial I'm using for making this whole thing and cheating you guys into thinking I can actually code anything).

I also implemented sounds and had a go at creating my own sound effects with BFXR - now that was fun! :) as for the music, I grabbed a little nice chiptune released under CC here. I had a bit of trouble working out the sounds for the enemy shots so I ended up taking it off: they are all shooting at the same time for now so no matter which sound I put in it adds up and makes my ears bleed, besides sounding boring and repetitive. I know there are ways to randomise shots and change variation of pitch for the sounds but that's too much for my brain to handle yet.

Adding in buttons and screens and working out a game over also happened. I'm still on Unity 4.5 (heard UI is way better on 4.6 so I'll just update as soon as I finish writing this), so not sure how this compares to how things are now.... but yeah definitely been a bit annoying to figure out, and I hope the whole GUI skin having to be called over and over again has gone away. I would love being able to add things and tweak them visually in an editor - I know there's probably a way or some helpful framework for that, it's all good. I do enjoy going through this whole process and finding out easier ways of doing these things.

Last but not least, I really wanted to just publish a web game version of how are things so far just for the sake of it (and yeah for getting a little bit of the taste of putting something playable out there!). So behold, here is...

>>> SHMooP <<<

Controls are arrows to move and spacebar to shoot. Good luck and I'm sorry. No really. I am.

I don't mean to spoil things for this super complex game but if you manage to avoid that ridiculous wave of badly placed enemies you are rewarded with infinite space, it's pretty rad:

(^ credits for this pic go to AlphaDelete :D thank you, that made me smile!)

So yeah, this is it so far! I wanna add in score and make enemies spawn properly, so there's still a lot of work ahead. I know it's all super simple and unoriginal, but at this point I'm just really trying my best to understand the coding side of it... I'll eventually get to the game design bits when I feel a bit more comfortable (been drafting ideas etc so it's gonna happen for sure!) :)

Thanks for all the support and kind words, guys. Each fav, reply or RT gives me a special boost to keep going when things feel hard. You're all awesome! <3

[missmoocodes]

ShmOOp goes on!

So sometimes life happens, things get tough etc but what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Coding learning might slow down sometimes but it won't ever stop. So this is me, picking stuff from where I left :)

Last Friday night I went to the nearest Starbucks for some coding fun!

For the record - it was pretty fun indeed, and after I got shooed out cause they were closing I found an empty table somewhere in the mall and kept working. *inserts here moaning about no 24h cafe place around Isle of Dogs*

I mean, PARTICLES!!! Fun fun fun!

So this is the bit of tutorial I used, although I tweaked things in a different way and used my own assets. Coding for it was the same so here's the result:

Um. So yeah. I still need to do something about the amount of enemies in this. Next time, next time.

GIF this time cause vine-ing myself playing a shmup is all sorts of clumsy. And for the record - getting GIFs to be a size small enough for Twitter is a pain. Here are the apps I used: GifGrabber (or Licecap, I tried both and both work pretty well) for capturing some seconds of gameplay, reduce size using GIFBrewery and then further optimize and reduce size with ImageOptim. Oh, and I was using a mac, jsyk.

Coming next will be implementing sounds and menus. Hopefully getting enemies to spawn properly, but not gonna push my luck.

'Till the next Friday Coding Night! :)

[missmoocodes]

ShmOOp! Making a scrolling shooter

Lately I've been going through this very cool tutorial and trying to make my own silly shooter - gotta be honest there's a lot code wise that's just not sinking in, and that's a bit frustrating.

Overall there's always a thing or two I end up picking up. Guess that's how it goes.

I'll keep going with this until it's decent enough for me to put a working build online here, besides sharing my project on github and all that jazz! :)

So this is where I'm at currently:

Enemies are not spawning yet, but both player and enemies can shoot, hurt each other and YAY PARALLAX. My brain is having a hard time understanding the looping bit tho.

We'll get there. Hang in there brain.

And okay, I admit: all assets are stuff I did for past game jams, thrown together. Crazy confusing art mix.

On a side note, I've started watching lectures from this C# course on Coursera. It uses XNA, but the point is it seems to go over many fundamental programming basics, which is always helpful for us beginners. The course is not ongoing at the moment but the entire video lectures can still be viewed at any time (really wished all coursera classes worked this way...I keep missing classes and access to lectures I wanna see!).

That's it for today!

ps: thanks for all the supportive comments and help, you guys are wonderful. Learning coding can get hard and real frustrating at many times but having encouragement makes all the difference! <3

[missmoocodes]

Ludum Dare 30

Late post, I know. I'm still alive and still learning! But lately it's been mostly about going through Game Maker tutorials so I haven't got anything to show. Yet.

So guess what. Kinda did a little something for last Ludum Dare!

TL;DR: it was pretty fun and I obviously wasn't able to get anything finished in time. This post will probably be underwhelming.

But I did try and I'm happy I did! Learned a lot through it and had a great time brainstorming stuff at cafes etc. Also had a bunch of times in which I would weep, scratch walls, cry blood, roll on the floor and swear I'd never do something like that to myself again.

All lies, I totally will.

As the theme was Connected Worlds, I came up with a bunch of silly ideas and apparently picked the one that had less to do with being a game and a lot of unclear mechanics (yay!).

So this was it: a toy-game where you need to look after a garden and keep things alive by interacting with other things.

This was my first brainstorm sketch. After bouncing ideas off with friends this is what happened:

More focus on the garden itself and the interactive area became an underground little world.

Its system would basically consist in growing things that would provide you with resources for maintaning or building your tools.. which would let you keep growing things.

I aimed to have conditions like temperature, humidity and maybe an overall well being, like a mood gauge for the garden. You'd have to keep everything balanced in order to keep your garden healthy. All conditions however would tend to change on their own if left alone.

I have no idea whatsoever whether this would be fun or not.

So... what did I actually got done?

Take a deep breath, this is some heavy shit.

Yeah, I know. Embarrassingly little, and most of it I only managed to do through constantly bugging this cool dude to teach me things. I obviously tried to bite more than I could chew, but I kinda knew I was signing myself up for failure with this one. I was in for the learning. It was worth it!

I gotta say, making games is pretty rad. Really! Accomplishing something, creating an experience from scratch all by yourself feels super neat (collaborating with other people is awesome too!)

Really looking forward to the day I'll put a little game made all by myself out there and someone will play it and have a good time. That will be one awesome memorable day in my life.

So yup, totally gonna keep working so that happens! :)

Till the next - stay awesome and keep making things!

[missmoocodes]

Construct

Been trying to give Construct a go, but still finding things a little bit awkward. Let's see how this will go... :)

[missmoocodes]

Game 3: Tetris

Oops, a little late with my weekly log! So here's what happened last Friday (I think Friday nights are becoming my coding day of the week):

I'm still getting used to a workflow of committing stuff to git, so I forgot my Arkanoid project back at my desktop computer. As I was sitting at my fav cafe place, I decided to just start on something else, and pulled one tutorial (this one) for a tetris game and decided to give it a go. Now this one was slightly more frustrating as often I'd have trouble understanding what was actually going on. However, could still get a fair amount of learning from all the steps and things to worry about when writing code for specific actions of the game (and using matrices yay!). It's a whole lot of putting things in the right boxes and learning how to break down things in small bits. If something is not working, it's probably because you forgot to instruct the computer to do so. Which seems to be the tricky part to be aware of. I mean, other than knowing the exact way of writing that said instruction. All the magical little words and stuff. On hindsight, I still get surprised at the amount of stuff I can get wrong when all I'm doing is following a single tutorial! Lots of fiddling around, forgotten functions and curly brackets. Ouch. So here's what I managed to get working:

I'm calling it "Tetris with extra thinking time" :B Not to say I haven't tried getting the blocks to fall automatically, one unit per second. But alas this is what happened when I did:

I know I'm missing telling it to stick to one direction, but kinda have no idea how to write that. I'm assuming writing "hey you dumb thing stick to decreasing on the y axis" won't just work. But hey. So what next? Unsure. I might go back to my Arkanoid, fix this Tetris or try something else. Guess it'll all depend on my coding mood tomorrow night. I kinda feel like coding something where I can have a bit more fun with the artwork, but we'll see. :) Stay tuned!

[missmoocodes]

Game 2: Arkanoid Clone log #003

Status: basic game completed! WOOOOO! In exactly a week! Maybe I can keep this up after all? :o

So my last Friday evening started with some happy coding in a nearby Starbucks - I was feeling shitty about some personal things and making stuff is usually one great mood boost so:

(now just picture a girl wearing big glasses and a Videogames Romantic shirt behind that computer)

I resumed working at home and basically tried stitching together all the tutorials for breakout clones I had found, which in hindsight might not have been the greatest idea ever... but then again it might just have been?

Basically forcing myself going through lots of different codes and ways of achieving the same thing, changing stuff as to fix conflicts, spot undefined classes and even doing some hacks of my own ended up being a pretty great learning exercise! Also a super confidence boost, hehe :D

Not even gonna go on about the whole hour I spent looking for a missing curly bracket. DEM BRACKETS.

But yeah, even though I still don't get a lot of the methods and things I'm using, I've been able to find my way around with a lot less struggle than before. Kinda like, slowly building more familiarity with the code and language :) Even just knowing how to search for stuff I need has been a lot easier.

Also, I can safely say implementing GUI in Unity is a hellish nightmare (looking forward to Unity 5! :O)

My coding night ended at 5am on the Saturday. I had barely noticed time pass and had a ridiculous amount of fun! This is what I've got so far (I'll edit this post later to add the link to the github project):

So what next?

I feel like I want to take this next week to review a few things and add some pretties to the game, just so I can see how juicer I can get it to feel. I also wanna go over the code and look up some stuff so I can understand better what was going on.

'till the next! :)

[missmoocodes]

Completely forgot to post this - that's my arkanoid clone so far! :)

Last Friday night I had a fun evening at my favourite cafe place to code and tried to leave tutorials aside so I could apply what I had learned doing my Pong... as you can see I didn't get very far. Got stuck as when I turn gravity off and just give it an initial speed+direction my ball hits the ceiling and just... slides off to freedom without bouncing.

I know this looks pretty underwhelming, but felt like a big deal to me! It feels kinda rewarding just to make something happen by myself. It's gonna get more exciting than this, I promise.

'till the next! :)

[missmoocodes]

Women & Code

Hey people! I currently have my hands full with side projects but not gonna let the learning pacing slow down ;) more Arkanoid clone adventures will be coming shortly! Now... as you can probably guess after reading my motivational-personal post, I'm super interested in as well as trying to engage more in initiatives to have more women (of any age, but especially young) learn how to code. So here are a couple of interesting things going on I thought would be cool to share: Google has partnered with Code School and Women Techmakers to offer 3 free months of learning - this push however is more targeted at women already inside the tech community, as well as other minorities. Their website also links to a whole bunch of other communities engaged in doing cool things for women and the tech industry, so have a look through as it's a great way to get in touch with other related programs! :) Made with Code is another neat idea that tries to get young girls interested in Computer Science by offering free classes, projects and resources, as well as connecting you to events and related communities in your area. I'm also a big fan of the Geek Gurl Diaries, which is a rad video log series on Women & Tech with a whole bunch of Raspberry Pi tutorials - which was pretty much the push I needed to get my very own Pi and start making things. I guess this is it for now, I'll keep an eye out and post as I remember and find more stuff. Let me know if you have any recommendations!

[missmoocodes]

"A juicy game feels alive and responds to everything you do. Tons of cascading action and response for minimal user input."

Awesome talk that had been sitting on my watch list for ages and I finally watched! Really worth a watch by anyone involved in making games :)

[missmoocodes]

Game 2: Arkanoid Clone log #001

Just occurred to me that making a breakout clone is a pretty cool next step, as there's a lot I can apply from what I learned doing that pong clone :) moving paddles, ball, the collision angles when the ball hits the paddle..

...there's also a lot of room to bend rules and come up with crazy additions! However I'll start with the simplest clone possible first, and tweak it from there. Let's see how this goes.

I was told it's a nice practice to leave your computer alone and start by brainstorming and writing down all the instructions you'll have to tell your computer. So this is my early codestorm!

[missmoocodes]

Next: Arkanoid!

Mmmmkaaay, after Pong I'm giving an Arkanoid clone a try :) I'm looking at these tutorials here (will come back and add more if I find any):

http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/build-arkanoid-with-unity-project-setup--cms-20767

http://www.programmersranch.com/2013/06/unity3d-arkanoid.html

A breakout clone development diary: https://ccplz.net/threads/unity3d-breakout-clone-development-diary.56048/

Another diary, with source code included: http://studentguru.gr/b/dt008/archive/2014/06/30/arkanoid-tutorial-in-unity-source-code-included

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IksKQrpaQc (apparently a super simple version)

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNJJql-_-YA (hehe... there's a sad/tired face in the url for this video.... :D)

And my official soundtrack while I do this will be this one.

[missmoocodes]

missmoocodes is a week and a half old! :D

I SURVIVED!

This is a small celebration for surviving that delicate period of Initial Excitement of Beginning a New Thing and Not Letting Go. (Now check back in a month please)

It's been a fairly consistent week and something of reading, picking up and trying to code stuff with occasional breaks for bouts of depression and existential crisis. It's all good, the world is still going round and my brain made a fair amount of new connections. It feels great. I still have no idea of what I'm doing 99% of the time.

So. I've been asked things lately, and I also want to talk about some things. Kinda in the mood for ranting a little bit so please bear with me :)

Why learn to code?

I've been asked this a few times lately. Why learn how to code? I guess there are a whole bunch of valid reasons, but if I gotta pick the most important one, it'd be that yes, the desire to has always been there.

Some facts:

My dad is one of my biggest role models. Like, honestly. That dude is my hero. I identify deeply with him as we have the same mild, quiet, slow paced patient personality. If I'm anywhere near stubborn/determined about working things out, it's because I learned that from him - he'd tackle on new things and master the shit out of that with so much love and dedication it'd always leave me in awe. As I grew up we wouldn't talk much like I would to my mom and wouldn't be as open about our feelings either, but that didn't feel like a big deal. He was and still is always present and as a kid we'd do fun lots of fun things together. We'd read comics and talk about computers.

And believe me, we talked about computers A LOT. Like, 90% of the time.

I grew up with computers. Our first computer ever was a ZX Spectrum, then an IBM XT and an IBM AT, and others followed. I'd watch my dad code stuff and fiddle with engineering software and I would fiddle around in MS-DOS and play Prince of Persia and Life & Death (and get nightmares cause that game was so very creepy). We had a bunch of those 80s coding magazines with entire scripts for coding your own games. The concept of typing a whole bunch of stuff and then having a game blew my mind. I wanted to do that!

Except I couldn't. "That's dad's work computer", "You don't know what you're doing", "Why don't you play these games here instead".

It didn't seem like a children's thing to me back then so I dropped the subject. Computers still felt alien. There was no internet. There wasn't anything in portuguese about it I could read. I don't really blame my parents, it's just how things were at the time. We didn't have that much information nor access to suitable materials. Classes were expensive.

I'd still follow my dad around in bookshops and we'd always stare at the comp sci section. Sometime during my early teens, when we already had internet and Windows was a thing, he picked up some Visual Basic book which I would try to read. I made my own Hello World back then. But it still felt too hard and I had little incentive. I had never heard of someone my age doing anything like that. For some obscure reason I spent ridiculous amounts of time playing around with Microsoft Access cause fiddling with database softwares seemed fun to my brain. Don't ask.

I had never heard or dreamed about the possibility of coding my own games anytime before my last year in high school or something. But by then I was already pretty hooked on art stuff and drawing all the time, as that was something I always got loads of incentive to carry on. But still, Computer Science was my first option for a major, followed by Arts.

In the end, well, I went with Arts. Not because I liked Comp Sci any less, but because I didn't felt as capable of handling it. I knew drawing. I didn't know a thing about programming and felt dumb.

But yeah, I always looked back and told myself one day I'd learn this stuff. I kinda felt I'd be good at it for some reason, once I got past the basics. So here I am.

I like the thought process involved in coding. I like putting things in boxes, I like structure. I like knowing the bigger picture, especially when making art for games, and knowing the technical aspects involved in making my assets. And I also like how coding is related to a bunch of things I like as well as to people deeply meaningful to me. That said, I just dig learning and making things way too much to not seriously make this happen. My dad learned how to crochet and make jewelry in his fifties. Why the hell couldn't I learn how to code? Why not?

Ultimately, as cheesy as it may sound, I do believe that you can learn anything if you put your mind to it. You can learn how to draw, how to code, learn how to speak another language, how to dance. People have different pacing for learning things, that's all. Some do it faster, others slower, but everyone is capable given enough time, effort and incentive. There's no such thing as being too late for starting something. And it isn't exactly easy, but that's okay. Life is hard. We need more stories and role models of progress through struggles out there and less focus on "talent" and people who made it through and got it right in their first try, because that's not what happens to most of us. We need to value failure and trying things. We gotta cherish that process so we can live to the fullest of our potentials.

Making this tumblr and sharing all this here came out both of a need for self motivation as well as having the opportunity to motivate and help out others while I try things. We live in an amazing time where information is out there for free and you can reach out, collaborate with people and grow together. It's a super exciting and empowering thing! :)

So yeah. Why not? Go do it! Be awesome.

[missmoocodes]

Moar Unity resources

Registering these here before I completely forget:

http://www.unity3dstudent.com/category/modules/essential-skills/ (thanks for the rec Ken Wong! :D)

http://cgcookie.com/ - paid training, loads of stuff on Blender, Max and Unity (via Kevin)

I'm taking a break from looking for materials as I've got a fair chunk of stuff to go through now, but now and then I'll come upon interesting tutorials and register here (just finding out I lose everything if I just fav/RT it on twitter). :)

Currently I'm reading The C# Yellow Book and having a good time with that. Not sure if it's the most reliable book ever but language is easy to understand and the writer has a good sense of humour which always makes things easier!

[missmoocodes]

Unity

Omg you guys Unity's documentation is beautiful. I'M UNDERSTANDING STUFF. That's how nicely explained it is.

http://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules/beginner/scripting

https://unity3d.com/learn/live-training/archive

On a side note, super excited cause my friend Bruno helped me out by pushing a working score to my pong thing with scripts nicely commented (which I have just merged) and my brain is in a very happy excited place right now.