To learn about Unity, you can use any recent version of the Unity game authoring software. This book was written using the free version of Unity 4.2, but the majority of the examples work fine in the previous version, 3.5, of the software. It doesn't matter if you are a Mac or PC user, as they are treated equally by Unity.

Some examples illustrate functionality of the Pro version. To be honest, they were illustrated with the free 30-day trial that you can activate from your free license.

During the writing of the book, two very important updates to Unity became available: the inclusion of the basic iOS and Android add-ons for every Unity license and the addition of real-time shadows in the free version (since release 4.2). Who knows what newer updates will offer…

In addition, you'll need a 3D CAD or Building Information Modeling (BIM) system, such as AutoCAD, ArchiCAD, Revit, Rhino, or SketchUp. Trial-versions are available for all these applications, but chances are that if you are reading this book, you'll be familiar with at least one of them. The examples are elaborated using ArchiCAD and CINEMA 4D, but the concepts translate well to other systems, such as 3ds Max or Maya.

Finally, it is always good to know how to use Photoshop, GIMP or similar image editors.

This book is primarily written for students and professional architects who know how to model buildings in 3D and have a need to turn their designs into interactive models, even if you never used Unity before.

To be fair, this book is not an introduction to professional game level development, as the methods for highly performing optimized models are often in conflict with the approach of architectural modeling and the constant need for including design changes. The way an architect creates a 3D model of a building is completely different from how a game designer would approach it, for example, using mesh topology optimization, texture atlas editing, or UV unwrapping, applied in non-CAD or BIM software.

Experience with visualization software and programming in any language can be helpful, but is not required to follow along. You will learn all the basics with the step-by-step examples.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "To react on collisions with a trigger, we use the OnTriggerEnter method."

A block of code is set as follows:

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;
public class loadLevel : MonoBehaviour {
  void Example () {
    Application.LoadLevel("Level1");
  }
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;
public class loadLevel : MonoBehaviour {
  public string level;
    void Example () {
    Application.LoadLevel(level);
  }
}

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

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