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via Udemy |
Go to Course: https://www.udemy.com/course/procedural-cities-in-unity-blender/
Certainly! Here's a comprehensive review and recommendation for the Coursera course on Procedural Generation in Games and Virtual Environments: --- **Course Review and Recommendation: Procedural Generation in Games and Virtual Environments** Are you interested in mastering the innovative art of procedural generation for games and virtual environments? This Coursera course offers a comprehensive, hands-on learning experience that bridges the gap between art, design, and programming—an essential skill set for modern game developers, artists, and aspiring indie creators alike. **Course Overview:** This course delves into the algorithmic creation of infinite, unique digital environments, encouraging a deeper understanding of both the technical and artistic facets involved. Taught by industry veterans Penny de Byl and Mike, the course combines academic rigor with practical industry insights, making complex concepts accessible and engaging. **What You Will Learn:** - **Part A:** Led by Mike, focuses on creating cityscapes starting from simple placeholder blocks to full procedural city generation. You’ll learn essential modeling techniques using Blender 3.0, including the use of modifier stacks and Geometry Nodes for procedural asset creation. - **Part B:** Guided by Penny, emphasizes game engine integration with Unity 2020.3. You’ll design city layouts, manipulate road models, and employ algorithms like Voronoi diagrams and Perlin Noise to generate populated zones and city densities. Both parts are flexible—studied independently or together—offering a holistic skillset that covers the entire pipeline from initial design to implementation. **Strengths:** - **Hands-On Projects:** The course emphasizes real-world application with projects that build towards a professional toolkit. - **Dual Perspective:** Combining technical programming with artistic modeling provides a balanced approach, enhancing your versatility. - **Industry-Relevant Tools:** Uses industry-standard software (Unity 2020.3, Blender 3.0), ensuring skills that are immediately applicable. - **Expert Instruction:** Penny and Mike bring extensive industry and academic experience, and their teaching methods are praised for clarity, depth, and encouragement of independent problem-solving. - **Flexibility:** Available on both Windows and Mac, with content well-tested across platforms. **Who Should Take This Course?** - Aspiring game developers interested in procedural content generation. - Artists and designers wanting to understand the technical side of environmental creation. - Programmers looking to expand their toolkit with procedural algorithms. - Indie creators aiming to produce dynamic, scalable virtual environments. **Final Recommendation:** If you are looking for a course that not only teaches the "how" but also reveals the "why" behind procedural generation techniques, this offering from Penny and Mike is a superb choice. It’s highly praised for its thorough content, practical approach, and the ability to empower students with skills that are highly valued in the game development industry. **Pro Tip:** While the course leverages Unity and Blender, the principles learned are applicable across various platforms, making this an investment in your foundational knowledge of procedural generation that will serve you well beyond the specific tools used. --- Overall, I highly recommend this course for anyone eager to push their game development skills into procedural realms with confidence and creativity.
Procedural generation in games and virtual environments lends itself to the algorithmic generation of infinitely unique computer-created experiences. Its potential lies in its ability to automatically develop digital content on demand, reducing the amount of work required by programmers and modellers. However, a lot of preparation is necessary for such a strategy to be implemented. A thorough understanding of the role that both sides of the game development coin (technical/logic and art/design) plays in procedural generation is key for a successful implementation. In this course, Penny and Mike bring a unique experience to both programmers and artists alike and combine their skills and many years of industry and academic knowledge to bring you a holistic learning experience, in which you will find content and invaluable mastery. This course uses Unity 2020.3 and Blender 3.0 and is Windows and Mac compatible.The content has been tested and works with Unity 6.The content is presented in two parts which can be studied in any order, independently or together.In Part A, Mike will be taking you through a series of stages, starting with blocking out your city with simple placeholders, a critical design step often overlooked. Taking those placeholders we add a little extra detail to start bringing the city to life and map out the road system properly. Once that warm-up is out of the way, Mike will start focusing on thinking in a more modular manner by looking at the fundamental building blocks required to make our assets. Then finally, we will move from placing the pieces manually to placing them automatically, first with Blender's Modifier Stack and finally completely procedurally using Blender 3.0's new Geometry Node system.In Part B, Penny will begin by taking you through a variety of workshops using the Unity game development engine, to teaching you how to manipulate and position road models on a plane to create a city street map. Following this, algorithms will be worked through to create data structures to store city information and populate the city with residential, commercial, and industrial buildings. The commonly used algorithms for Voronoi Diagrams and Perlin Noise will be employed to calculate city zones and city population densities.By the end of this course, you will have a professional toolkit of programming and modelling skills that will give you the advantage over others who are "just programmers" or "just modellers", including knowledge of multiple procedural techniques that can be employed in both Unity and Blender. Understanding game development that tightly integrates both design and logic from this standpoint is critical to making you a valuable commodity in the job market or preparing you for running an indie operation.What others are saying about Penny's courses:I do like Penny de Byl's courses and way of teaching, they are much more specific than your average "master Unity" kind of courses and usually, you don't learn just the engine but also how things work behind the scenes. She's really amazing!I've been coding for about 3 years and since purchasing Penny's "Animation", and "Procedural Terrain" courses, the excitement and fun have returned once again to my programming.Penny and her team know their stuff and are just amazing in explaining everything, breaking it down. Most importantly she challenges you to do stuff on your own rather than just "spoon-feeding" you everything. Then she comes back and shows you one way of doing it. Just an amazing course!!! What others are saying about Mike's courses:I've used Blender for a number of years, but I'm a total novice next to Mikey and I've learned so very much from him here!Mikey is an amazing teacher, I can't praise this course highly enough. Worth every penny.Mikey is a talented, thorough, and clear instructor, and he knows how to make the student think 'for themselves', which is such a great experience.