A few general questions

Okay, so I’ve been contemplating over the past few days of whether to use unity or UDK. As of right now I’m leaning towards unity, so I need to know a few things.

What do I need to know to use unity? I’m quite adept at 3d modeling, and can make anything if given time. In willing to learn to code (c# is best, right?) and I have quite a bit of time. I need a few tutorials to get going (ui, modeling, light settings, etc) and things of that nature. So if you know of any great ones that would be awesome. I use maya to model so if there are any problems with importing from maya, or problems with textures from maya etc.
Is it better to make the mesh in unity, or apply it in maya and import it? General information, and learning curves that I’ll need to work on, thanks.

Regards, Lewis.

Me, being a beginner at unity myself, know exactly how you feel. There are numerous tutorials all over the place though. I find it best tod know exactly what you want to make before you start learning. If you want to make extremely detailed terrains and spend most of your time on that, look up tutorials for that. If you are the kind of person who likes scripting (I do), all I can say is that this website and unity script reference are your best friends. I use JavaScript mostly because that’s the language that I heard about first but yeah, I think that c# is the most versatile. As for maya, I have no idea about the program itsself but as long as it can export a .fbx, .3ds, .obj, or about any other 3d file format (except .dae so no sketchup), you should be good to go. Hope I helped:)

On the maya thing here has a list of all the current 3D modeling tools that are supported, and the appropriate formats for each tool.

In terms of language its whatever your comfortable with just don’t combine them (there are horror stories about attempting)

for tutorials do a search here for the word tutorial I have seen the same recommendations over, and over again.

i think i have answered two of these questions already but look at the videos on youtube for willgoldstone and the tornado twins, they will explain unity and code, lights you will have to look else where as there is a lot you can do with them to get a really nice effect,