ReSharper by JetBrains

The things that ReSharper showed me and thought me is simply amazing. It’s like having your own personal pair programmer sitting right next to you all the time.

It tells you if your code is good, if you actually use the code you create and it even helps you reformat/refactor your code to make it more robust.

An example that blew me out of the field was with an iteration I was working on which went over a List. ReSharper offered a suggestion to use Linq and went right ahead rewriting the whole iteration into a Linq statement. This is great for teaching you new stuff !

iTween by Bob Berkebile a.k.a pixelplacement

iTween is a very nice script that will help you animating your objects with a nice and consistent abstraction. Animation itself is not that hard in unity but why make your life harder then it already is ? The documentation of iTween is very clear and well written. Also it seems like everyone is actually using it 🙂

Sometimes you need to take care when importing that you do not end up with a duplicate of iTween since they can cause conflicts. Just remove the one from the import so it uses your default version.

Mixamo

Because we come to game development from a background of programming, creating 3D models is not something we’ll likely do ourselves. In our search for a good source of 3D models, we found Mixamo. Mixamo is awesome!

Mixamo does three things:

• They sell 3D models
• They sell animations for 3D models that ‘just work’ with their own models
• They offer a service that allows you to animate any 3D model you upload, as long as it has the minimum number of bones in it to perform the animation

They have a couple of freebies in the Unity store, but most of their model packs cost about 40 dollars. Separate motions usually go for 10-20 dollars. Custom motions and sequences of motions get more expensive as you increase their complexity.

MeshLab

MeshLab is an is an open source, portable, and extensible system for the processing and editing of unstructured 3D triangular meshes. And can be found on source forge.

The nice thing about this tool is that it allows you to import an 3d model in about any format. Once imported you can optimize the model by reducing the amount of polygons.

Take a look at this video to get an impression of how awesome this tool is :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_r-cT2jngk

Fov Mesh Maker by Hyungseok Seo

Fov Mesh Maker by Hyungseok Seo is a very nice tool if you would like to know if objects are in a field of view of an other object.

I’ll let the video do the explaining :

Simple Path by Alex Kring

If you need any Pathfinding in your game , please take a look at Simple Path by Alex Kring.

I guess the video will tell you the specifics a lot better then I could, so have a look :

Even when you are new to unity, this is a wonderfully documented plugin which is a simple breeze to work with.

Filter Forge

Filter Forge

While watching one of the many unity3d tutorials out there, one spoke of Filter Forge. This is a Photoshop plugin but can be used Stand Alone as well. IT works on both Mac and Windows. Though initially the price seems quite steep ($400,-), you’ll figure very soon that it’s worths it money as it comes with a texture library of around 8000 different textures.

The great thing about his program is that the textures are all procedurally created and thus have a lot of settings you can tweak with. This way you can change the color, details, bumpiness and a whole slew of other things 🙂 After generating your texture you can then let Filter Forge generate Normal Maps , Bump Maps, Hight Maps, Light Maps etc etc of the texture you generated. Import those into unity and create your materials from them with all the options you’ll need.

As you can imagine this gives you a huge boost in graphics and making you game look awesome 🙂 Also at the time of this writing ( 19 July 2010) they are having a 50% discount ! So go for it !