A free and exclusive online Unity course for Immerse UK premium members.

Unity is quickly becoming one of the most valuable tools for creators who want to build, interactive immersive experiences.

Whether you’re a digital artist, technical director, animator, technical artist, or general Unity enthusiast looking to create immersive experiences, this course will help you to learn fundamental Unity skills and give you an overview of how realtime technology is revolutionising the creative process.

 

Course overview

Unity, the world’s most widely used real-time engine, is used to create half the world’s games. Unity’s flexible real-time tools offer incredible possibilities for filmmakers and creators across industries and applications in 2D, 3D, VR and AR.

During this course, you will develop fundamental Unity skills, learn to create an environment and props, animated characters and refine your scene with lighting, effects and interactions. As an artist and storyteller, you will learn how to leverage one of the most powerful new technologies to bring your ideas to life in real-time.


Course outline

Class 01  – Intro to Unity & Level Building

In this unit, you’ll learn about previsualisation in Unity by modelling a city based on a reference sketch. In the process you’ll learn about configuring the look of the editor, working with Primitives, ProBuilder shapes, creating materials and adjusting lighting.

  • Arranging the editor layout to suit your needs
  • Intro to ProBuilder & ProGrids
  • Creating and altering materials to establish a look

Class 02 – Environment, Modeling, and Set Dressing

We’ll move forward to a more visually developed scene in which you’ll learn to assemble an environment using more refined art assets provided by your creative team. You’ll model a new prop for the set directly inside Unity. You’ll add ambiance to your set with lighting and emissive Materials. Finally, in the creative challenge, you’ll use the provided props and new props you create to set-dress a new area of the scene.

  • Assembling the set
  • Creating props with ProBuilder
  • Adding basic lighting to a set
  • Exploring emissive materials

Class 03 – Animation

In this unit, you’ll learn all the basics of creating animation in Unity using Timeline — from animating props to animating generic and humanoid characters.

  • Creating a timeline and adding keyframed animation tracks
  • Configure generic rigs and add animation clips
  • Configure humanoid rigs and add animation clips

Class 04 – Adding Visual Fidelity Through Lighting

In this unit, you’ll learn all about lighting and post-processing in Unity. This unit is important because so much of the visual fidelity and ambiance of the project happens here. You’ll not only learn about lights but also shadows, important settings, and post-processing techniques essential to creating mood in your Scene and style in your camera shots.

  • Setting up the lighting using point lights and spotlights
  • Apply post-processing effects to the scene
  • Adding post-processing effects per camera shot

Class 05 – Effects and Shader Graph

In this unit, you’ll learn about Unity’s visual effects tools, including the Particle System, shader graph, and VFX Graph. You’ll also learn how to work with sound effects and music.
  • Creating Visual Effects
  • Shader Graph
  • Working with Audio

Class 06 – Scripting & Bolt

Bolt is a visual scripting asset for Unity. It enables Unity users to create logic for games or applications without writing code. Bolt has visual, node-based graphs that both programmers and non-programmers can use to design final logic or to quickly create prototypes.
  • Learn about the Bolt visual scripting interface
  • Become familiar with visual scripting concepts
  • Navigate the Bolt graph, graph inspector and variables windows
  • Develop mechanics and system using Bolt’s node based graph system

Class 07 – XR Integration

You’ll learn an extensive range of principles and best practices: from locomotion and hand presence, to optimisation and testing,and user interaction.
  • Using Unity to develop VR experiences
  • Locomotion and ergonomics
  • Hand presence and interaction
  • Best UI practices for VR

Class 08 – AR  Foundation

AR Foundation enables the construction of Augmented Reality applications targeting both iOS and Android devices. This means you can use AR Foundation to build an AR Unity application and deploy it to either an iOS or Android device without changing any of the Scene’s scripts or components.

  • Configuring Unity for AR Development
  • Setting up the development environment for AR Applications
  • Setting Up AR Foundation
  • How to publish to iOS
  • How to publish to Android

About your trainer

Ben Radcliffe is a media and entertainment technical specialist with 20 years of experience in VFX, CG feature, and TV animation.  He’s worked for a variety of top studios, including Dreamworks Animation, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Disney Feature Animation, MPC, and Industrial Light and Magic, and he’s worked as a digital artist supervisor on major franchises including Avengers and Transformers.

In his role at Unity, Ben works with technical decision-makers and influencers at key studios to advance the art and science of visual effects and animation through the use of real-time technology.