Are you a Blender artist with an interest in making your own games? If so, you may have overlooked a huge opportunity.

Let me introduce you to Unity 3D, a revolutionary game engine and toolset that is redefining the game industry. In days of old there were 3D artists and there were game programmers and the line separating two camps was pretty entrenched. Programmers worked on code and shied away from art and artists stayed clear of anything to do with code. What has happened over the past half decade however is that this clear devision of labor has become blurred by tools like Unity 3D.

Artists interested in crossing the boundary and learning to code and construct an entire game are now better of then ever before.

Unity 3D has always supported the use of Blender for it’s models and assets which is a welcome choice to the thousand of indie game developers out there on a budget who may not welcome the added expense of a 3D package like Maya.

3D artists are far more technically inclined than they think and can often learn the basics of creating games in Unity in a matter of a few days or weeks on their own, or even a matter of hours by taking an online course.

Having been a developer and instructor for most of my adult life, I believe it’s far easier to take a 3D artist and teach them to code than it is to take a programmer and teach them to become a good artist.

So where does a Blender artist looking to sink their teeth into Unity 3D get started?

To start with you can consult the Unity documentation for things like how to import your models into Unity.

http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/HOWTO-ImportObjectBlender.html

If you’d want to speed up your production pipeline and skip rigging your models why not check out Mixamo.

http://www.mixamo.com/c/automatic-rigging-for-blender-unity3d

If you’re looking for a good book to help get you started have a look at Game Character Creation with Blender and Unity

You may also want to watch this video put up by Unity called Artist as Programmers

Check out Making a Mechanim compatible Rig in Blender

As far as training goes, there are a lot of free tutorials online to help get you started, but from experience I can tell you the quality of these videos can very greatly and may or may not be up to date. Unity has change quite a bit over the years and is now on version 4.

This is one of the main reasons I put together a new online course called Anyone Can Learn to Make a Game. As a college instructor with over 10 years of experience teaching programming to people of all ages I’ve found simple and effective ways to help people learn even the most complicated technical concepts and skills. I’ve baked this experience into my new course and priced at 1/10 of the cost of my normal college courses to make an easy choice for anyone looking to get up to speed on learning to make games with Unity 4. If you are interested, you can find the new course here http://www.udemy.com/unity-tutorial . I’ve designed this course to get you up to speed in the shortest time possible which means you’ll be making your first game sooner than you think.

Another few things you may benefit from knowing is that many game coders lack the ability to create great 3D content, so learning more about Unity 3D can open up a lot of new business opportunities. Another business opportunity for Blender artists is developing paid content for the Unity asset store. There are tens of thousands of Unity developers out there looking to buy great content. Maybe some of this great content can be yours. For more information on this visits: http://unity3d.com/asset-store/submit-content

Game on Blender Artists. Look forward seeing more of you around in the Unity community!