Useful Unity3D Stuff

I work quite extensively with Unity3D and over these past few years I've come across a ton of problems. Usually I managed to find a solution for them, but I don't always keep a record of those solutions. If I do, it ends up being a bookmark or a note somewhere. So I decided to make a post to keep track of useful stuff for Unity3D. I can finally clean up my mess! And who knows. It might help other people as well.

Unity3D Useful Tools, Scripts, Shaders

Unity3D Fixes and Workarounds for Bugs and Other Wacky Things

Unity3D Features & C# Explanations

Articles and links that explain how certain features and coding principles actually work.

 

by Elwin Lee

Create Bitmap Fonts for Unity3D

I used to use BMFont to generate bitmap fonts for Unity3D when my Windows laptop was still working. It's still out at the repair center waiting to be fixed, so I've been working on a Macbook ever since. Unfortunately, BMFont is only available for Windows, but I found a great alternative called Littera. It's a web application to generate bitmap fonts and it has numerous awesome extra features such as adding gradient, stroke, shadow, bevel, etc. Generating a bitmap font is very straightforward. You just upload a font set the desired size, resolution and format, and export it!

Littera

by Elwin Lee

[How-to-Fix] Bold / Italic not showing in Epubs

Making Epubs is a pain in the ass. You can't just convert a PDF into an Epub that can be used effectively for e-readers as it requires style formatting and further editing. One thing that was super annoying was that Bold & Italic text wasn't showing properly. The Epub worked fine in Adobe Digital Editions, but the font style didn't show up correctly in Calibre.

One way to fix this is to manually dig into the Epub and change the CSS (rename the file's extension from .epub to .zip or .rar -> open it -> find "template.css" -> edit the CSS in an editor such as Dreamweaver -> save -> rename file extention back to .epub). This option is very tedious and sensitive to errors, but it does the job.

Later I found out it could have been fixed way easier... Upon exporting your Epub in InDesign, go to the Contents tab and Uncheck "Include Embeddable Fonts". This is very counter intuitive as you might think you would want to embed any fonts for it to be able to display your fonts properly.


Anyway, easy fix... took me hours to figure out... hopefully I can save someone some headaches :)

by Elwin Lee

[How-to-Fix] Working with InDesign to export ePub


I started working on an eBook with InDesign a few weeks back. InDesign has an option to export your document to an ePub file which can be used for eBook readers. If you don't have a reader to test it on, you can download the Adobe Digital Editions on your computer for free! Or even better... Use Calibre to manage your ebooks or test your epubs on virtual devices!

Anyway, exporting to ePub is quite easy, but you need to pay attention to how you format your documents. For example, page layouts are different, page breaks and returns aren't included, fonts paragraph/character styles, etc. I found a very nice guide from CreativePro, which explains these problems and gives you solutions on how to fix it :D
Indesign ePub Guide Part 1 | Part 2

The most annoying thing however, is that InDesign (CS5.5) doesn't export your table styles. The guide suggests manually editing the CSS file after exporting, which is a pain in the ass. To do this, export your document to ePub. Rename your file from .epub to .zip. Open the file and locate the CSS file.
It's a drag... but it's the only solution that I could find on the web until Adobe fixes this in the new CS version.

by Elwin Lee