Help with Creating a New Model

[jspro]

Hello,

I posted here a couple of months ago about using the asset with a notebook, rather than a book. I've decided now is a good time to give that a shot, so I'm here asking for advice/details as to how to integrate the model with the scripts. Forgive me if these questions are simple, I'm not a 3D Artist, haha ^^

What I've determined so far:

• The resulting model needs to have the various open/close/front/back/middle animations (like the provided Book model).
  
• I also need to create a page model + animation, which is where the contents of the book will be shown.
  
• To make the script work as is, I also need to provide a few stand-in models.
  

What I'm confused about:

1. Do I need to name the materials on the meshes anything specific? I'm getting errors right now when I try to assign materials to the endless book script.
   
2. Is it important that the book model uses bones? Or can I add a dummy skinned mesh renderer component?
   
3. Suppose I wanted to add more material types (example: other side of the front cover); how should I go about modifying the EndlessBook script?

I'd greatly appreciate the help. If it's not too much trouble, maybe you could also summarize of the process in its entirety?

Best,

Malek

[echo17]

I'm not a 3D artist either I wanted a book asset that was fully scriptable, but I was not finding anything already made, which led me to create EndlessBook. I took about three months to learn some basic modeling using Blender, then spent another five months creating this asset. It's been tweaked and refined over the past few years, so it is definitely not a quick and easy process if you are coming from no modeling experience.

A lot of what I learned was just to get me through a particular point, and the details of that process are lost in the years since I implemented them. Here's a high level view:

EndlessBook uses one animated mesh that handles all the different transitions to different states. The stand-in models are for the states themselves. The book uses about 50 bones to make a smooth animation on the page materials. I didn't want the CPU trying to process those bones every frame while the book sat idle in its different states, especially because those states are where most of the time is spent. The static mesh is quick to render and takes virtually zero processing power.

1) I don't think the material names should matter, as long as you have them in the correct order. The index of the materials and where they are assigned in the model are what is important.
2) I don't think bones should matter, as long as you have the animations matching what is set up in the Mecanim data. You will have to have animations if you are going to use the existing Mecanim animation data, triggers, and the scripting. They all interact to fire events that change the state and animation.
3) I would do a search for the word material in the EndlessBook scripts. That way you'll find all the locations where the materials are referenced.

Honestly, for the product you are wanting to make, it would probably be easier to start from scratch rather than modify EndlessBook. The notebook you described is a completely different animal and will require a lot of modification. Learning the modeling, animating, and scripting will be beneficial in the long run. You can certainly use EndlessBook as a reference when you go to make your own models and scripts for your notebook, but modification is going to give you a lot of headaches since most of what you need will not map directly to a new product. EndlessBook is meant to be a turnkey solution for those needing a book-shaped animated model with customizable pages. Anything else is just a different product.

My advice:
- Start with some basic modeling tutorials. I would recommend Blender as it is free and there is a lot of information out there on it.
- If you are not familiar with scripting, I would go through Unity's tutorials. Youtube also has a lot of Unity specific tutorials that might help.
- If you are not familiar with animation, especially in Unity, I would recommend going through tutorials on Mecanim. It provides the triggers and state changes that are used in EndlessBook.

[jspro]

Thank you for your fantastic response; I have a much better idea of the requirements of the model now.

Of course, I'm more than ready to create a script (EndlessNotebook?) if I have to, but I feel that the only different requirement for my project is the model. Looking over the script, I suspect that it should work straight away (with some tinkering if I want to add more materials); I might be wrong, of course!

Once again, thank you for your thorough response, it's greatly appreciated

Best,
Malek

[jspro]

Just a quick update for posterity. I managed to get it working with a super simple notebook model I made (You can see it in action in the video below). There's some weird artifacts when the stand-ins are being used that I've yet to fix (EDIT: It was a UV Map issue). Besides what's been stated below, my last tip is to enable debug mode in the inspector, so you can assign all the component's important properties and variables, like materialMappings.

Thanks again, echo! Best,

Malek

Attachments:

Compressed_Notebook.flv (907.07 KB)

[echo17]

Very cool! Thanks for sharing, looking good.