You know the iPhone app. phenom has reached its tipping point when even the Louvre Museum has jumped on the bandwagon. Meanwhile, I think the number of iPhone users has reach a gazillion now. That’s right, there are more iPhone users than the population of the Earth, which means only one thing ‘ there is life on other planets. With all of these advances, I haven’t seen a myriad of development tools for iPhone content. And perhaps it’s simply because that community has not overlapped into my world of film and television. I did run across an amazing animation development tool, from my brethren in Denmark, called Unity.
There is no way that I can full touch on all the features that Unity has to offer, and frankly, I’m not sure which ones I should focus on. But I’ll do my best in this small space.
Unit is a full-featured 3D package, which works hand in hand with other asset creation tools like Photoshop, Maya and Max to generate 3D animation content for iPhone apps. Animation and rigs import into Unity with little to no trouble. Graphics utilize OpenGL and DirectX features so there is a very real WYSIWYG sense from 3D to Unity. The package is multiplatform, so development can be done on either Mac or PC (although we did notice some discrepancies between Windows and OSX’in favor of OSX). It uses the PhysX physics engine for real time simulations. For those things it cannot do out of the box (vertice deformation, for example), it uses .NET based JavaScript and C# as its languages for further development.
This package blew us away so completely and thoroughly, that we decided to buy it and the companion iPhone devkit for the not insubstantial price of around $350′ which, in the world of gaming development systems, is quite cheap. Unity 3D offers a 30-day trial license for you to kick the tires. I’d recommend this for 3D artists who are looking to get their feet wet in the everexpanding and enticing world of iPhone content development.
Website: www.unity3d.com
Price: $350
