Over at The Digital Lycaeum, Browncoat Jayson has published quite excellent summaries of the most recent Hangout of the Avatar and Pen of the Avatar sessions, which concerned (respectively) the Unity engine and 3D modeling:

On Hangout of the Avatar today, Chris Spears gave us the first of a series of tutorials on using Unity. Chris is the Technical Director on Shroud of the Avatar with Portalarium, and in addition to the great tutorial he also gave us a couple of announcements.

• Portalarium will be hosting 48-hour “Iron Chef” Unity Scene competitions. These will consist of the developers giving the community a “theme”, and accept submissions of scenes based on that theme during the contest window. The winners will receive prizes in the thousands of dollar ranges, including Unity Pro licenses, Oculus Rift devices, and SotA swag.
• A second Dungeon Kit has been released, featuring props for use alongside the first Dungeon Kit.
• A third Kit featuring caves and caverns will be coming to Developer+ backers soon.
• The Auto-Snap script is available to anyone, not just Developer+ backers.

On the last Pen of the Avatar Stephen Daniele, the Concept Art lead for shroud of the Avatar, and Isaac Oster, one of the digital artists at Portalarium, give us a brief overview of how to do 3D modelling.

Watch the Tutorial!
Stephen introduce the basics of normal mapping, and Isaac shows off how to use Zbrush. As always, the community chimed in with some additional questions. The full video runs just over an hour.

As well, Portalarium today released a work-in-progress animation of the female Avatar 3D model firing a bow:

I guess she didn’t have time to put her armour on.