Once again, a demonstration of some previous experimentation, this time with Unity 3D.

After Adobe released the update to Director MX a lot of us were upset with the lack of any update to the 3D engine. We were expecting support for DX9 shaders and the like yet all we got was a more efficient rendering engine. Any content we created inside it still looked as though it was running on DX7. It was from all the arguing on the forums that talk of Unity 3D caught my ear and so I investigated it.

Long story short, I was very impressed and in the days that followed I bought a mac mini and downloaded the trial version of the authoring environment. Just to clarify, Unity 3D content can only be created on a mac currently (edit: the Unity authoring environment is now available on windows, as of version 2.5) but it can be made to be viewable on windows machines as well. I did some terrain painting, shader scripting and imported a bit of geometry to create a small world, one of grass mountains and sky. This took about a day to do, that's how easy Unity is to pick up. If I were to do this in Director I'd have been slaving away for god knows how long (using at least three other apps) and it still wouldn't look anywhere near as good.

Click here for the annotated version

If you're willing to install the plugin, you can find the 'playable' demo here.