Started into the Great Fleece 3D course, and refreshing to start building something new and learning from Jonathan’s video lessons again rather than grinding away on my own continuing to tweak the Space Shooter. At first it seemed a rehashing of a lot of things I’ve done before in 3D, but very quickly some awesome new elements for me were brought into play. I had never used Cinemachine, and had done similar by manually animating various cameras. This fits nicely into Timeline, and gives a wonderful more organized and feature rich way to develop cutscenes or video demos from your game.
So many great built in features with Cinemachine to pan and track objects as well as seeing how to get the scene “Blocked” to swap to the cut scene actors. Even dolly features just like a real film studio, only better. The main camera moves around the scene to to virtual camera locations and can interpolate between shots. Setting up these scenes really showed the power of the simple Cntr+Shift+F key combination to set your camera views as well as keyframes in Timeline.
Many other great learning as I get into this course including seeing how to setup screen space post processing reflections in addition to standard reflection probes, and their enhanced quality. I’ll never use regular reflection probes again unless building a phone game due to a little more load.
Also I had never used the progressive preview baking — wow, can get a feel for lighting changes without waiting for a lengthy bake to see results. Also can prioritize the bake to preview where you are looking first.
Finished watching a great video from the Dutch Game Garden about gameplay feel, entitled the Art of Screenshake. Though was a lot more than about screenshake, it made me consider the details of making gameplay compelling.
