Thursday, March 30, 2023

Nara's Nook's Next Dimension Tales channel launches on YouTube

 

Dorena Bree, Siobhan Muir, Nara Malone, Shannan Albright

At the start of 2023 the Nook team decided to work together on a Unity Tutorial that promised we could create an animated story using Unity 3D without writing a single line of code. We were intrigued but skeptical. We decided to go for it and record our weekly progress so we'd have a reference, and we'd post the videos on YouTube so other adventurous souls could be encouraged. Given that we were using a tutorial from 2019 we expected there would be places where newer versions of Unity would not match up with a tutorial for an older version, so sharing our experience could also provide a roadmap for how to work around any issues we encountered. 

 While all of that sounded reasonable in theory, we overlooked one minor detail. We didn't know much about YouTube. None of us had ever made a video tutorial. And, there's probably a good reason most tutorials have a solo instructor. Looking back, it is hard to believe we actually thought we could hit the record button, work through the lesson together and that would yield something that made sense. Nevertheless, we did eventually hit on a practical workflow, and it only took us six weeks to produce the first 15-minute video. In our first one we show you how to create a Unity Project and setup your editor to match our workflow. There's a link in the description for downloading Unity and installing it if you don't already have it. We were already using Unity a lot in our Opensim projects, but this project is teaching us tricks and introducing us to features we hadn't discovered yet.


We start by building our simple space city of blocks and creating simple mesh objects. Our goal is to export and recreate our build in Opensim when we are done making this animated story.


~Nara

Friday, January 6, 2023

Happy New Year: Next Dimension Tales Debut

 

Hey folks, hope 2023 is going well for you so far. The Nook gang had their first meetup of the New Year yesterday and spontaneously decided it was time for us to create a Next Dimension Tales YouTube channel. Our focus is all things related to 3D Storytelling. We'll share details of our works in progress, tutorials on how we create 3D stories, and cute little animated clips that depict life in the next dimension.

The theme of this clip is joy and we're wishing you buckets of joy in the coming year. We hope it makes you smile. 


~Nara


 

Subscribe to the channel so you will know when we post. 

 


Sunday, December 11, 2022

The Nookettes at the OpenSimulator Community Conference December 11 2022

 We had a great time putting together our talk for the OSCC 2022 this year, and like all our projects, we had some bugs to work out each time we practiced. It seemed to go pretty well when all said and done.

If you want to see our talk: Nara's Nook: Our 10 Year Adventure in 3D Storytelling, it starts at about 3 hrs 33 minutes in the recorded stream in the video posted below. 


 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w-eC2igalA

#OSCC2022 #Virtual #OpenSim

Thanks to the folks at AvaCon and Mal Burns for helping us bring this presentation to life. If you'd like to learn more, feel free to find us at NarasNook in OpenSim at world.narasnook.com:8900