Nara's Nook's Next Dimension Tales channel launches on YouTube

 

Dorena Bree, Siobhan Muir, Nara Malone, Shannan Albright

At the start of 2023 the Nook team decided to work together on a Unity Tutorial that promised we could create an animated story using Unity 3D without writing a single line of code. We were intrigued but skeptical. We decided to go for it and record our weekly progress so we'd have a reference, and we'd post the videos on YouTube so other adventurous souls could be encouraged. Given that we were using a tutorial from 2019 we expected there would be places where newer versions of Unity would not match up with a tutorial for an older version, so sharing our experience could also provide a roadmap for how to work around any issues we encountered. 

 While all of that sounded reasonable in theory, we overlooked one minor detail. We didn't know much about YouTube. None of us had ever made a video tutorial. And, there's probably a good reason most tutorials have a solo instructor. Looking back, it is hard to believe we actually thought we could hit the record button, work through the lesson together and that would yield something that made sense. Nevertheless, we did eventually hit on a practical workflow, and it only took us six weeks to produce the first 15-minute video. In our first one we show you how to create a Unity Project and setup your editor to match our workflow. There's a link in the description for downloading Unity and installing it if you don't already have it. We were already using Unity a lot in our Opensim projects, but this project is teaching us tricks and introducing us to features we hadn't discovered yet.

We start by building our simple space city of blocks and creating simple mesh objects. Our goal is to export and recreate our build in Opensim when we are done making this animated story.

~Nara