I’m well aware that you can simply use the FBX Exporter in Unity to do this, however I thought I’d share the settings I’ve been using to successfully get models from Blender to Unity as I know many people have problems with this.
I have this specifically set up to be used only with selected objects because I use a lot of objects and non-deform bones as IK targets and helpers for rigging armatures.
These settings result in a scale of 1 and no rotations or scaling on objects.
Well, I would recomend to check “Tangent space” on the geometry panel even if tangent space from blender and unity are the same (remember to triangulate your mesh before exports). This solves a lot of problems with workflows that involve more than Blender, like baking tools.
Even is faster for Unity to import tangents than calculating them.
I works for me if I apply rotation and scale to everything before the export. Critical steps for me are to do this and to enable the “!EXPERIMENTAL! Apply Transform” option.
I currently save my .blend files inside my assets folder, and Unity seems to know exactly what to do with them. I am also able to edit these models and save with Unity knowing how to work with the changes.
What benefits are there to exporting to fbx first?
One Blend file can contain many many many different models. A character and all their clothes and weapons, for example. Wall parts and floor sections which you want to mix-and-match in your dungeon algorithm. A sample room with a character to judge the furniture scale. But you want separate FBX files for each specific controllable thing to import into Unity.
Once you have a group of settings you like, you should define them as a Preset. That’s what the [+] button next to “Operator Presets” will do for you. Unfortunately, each existing blend file has its own presets. Fortunately, you can set up your favorite presets and include them in the default blend file so all new blend files you create will start with all these preferred settings.
In that screenshot, the 3d model is very tiny (the one with yellow outline) since I had to zoom the scene view out a lot. For some reason the cloth paint tools project the cape of my 3d model really really big (and inverts it upside down).
I got around all of this by exporting to Version “FBX 6.1 ASCII” instead of the default “FBX 7.4 Binary”.
He did say you’ll want to export them each into their own fbx files. One disadvantage to having one big file that contains many objects inside is that, the moment you need to go back and edit one mesh inside that blend file, Unity has to reimport all of it, since it’s all in one file. That really makes the reimporting time longer than it needs to. Same thing with a blend file that has many animations inside it. You edit one animation, Unity is forced to reimport everything in that blend file, even if the others weren’t changed.
This is true, but having worked with Blender for many years, inside its Open Source code and also as a modeling user, I really really don’t like to assume that any other app should try to import the file themselves. Even if Unity is launching Blender and asking Blender to export to FBX, it’s expecting too much to assume I can tell Unity exactly how each FBX should be exported with all the settings available.
I would much rather take a big old gnarly composite file such as one blend with a complete house or a complete character with an extensive wardrobe, and keep it OUT of the Assets folder. I can then decide manually which pieces get exported as separate FBX files, and then put those FBX files into Unity’s clutches within the Assets tree. Maybe the house is made in Blender with 50 pieces, and I export them room by room into 4 FBX files. Maybe the dummy character is wearing all his clothes and holding several kinds of weapons.
This goes for other big old gnarly composite or specialty files which I don’t expect Unity to support directly, or the way I want them supported. Maybe I got some ALOS digital geography files and I need a special tool to export those to PNGs as height maps I can use in terrain building. Maybe I have a bunch of hundred-layer SVGs that I haven’t rendered or imported into Spine yet, to be able to animate them. Maybe I have photographs which need to be processed by other tools before they come out as height maps. To me, Blender files are not for Unity directly, but Blender has a nice little Export to FBX capability of its own which exports a specific set of blender objects, and has lots of options I want to tweak each time as appropriate.
That doesn’t mean I don’t version-control the big gnarly files, by the way, I just put them in a folder inside the project but outside the Assets folder.
There is a huge benefit in a team if you are the modeler and someone else does the level layouts, allows to import a bunch of meshes into one scene, still allowing to use them as single objects. You could also create a full scene in Blender then export the whole scene with all transforms applied, like a complete set of assets (best example: modular pieces for some architectural design). It is way faster than having to import each one separately.
Agreed. When I make structural models in Blender, there are often variants with different pieces built on a common base. In Blender, these are separate objects, and I select or deselect them just prior to each export in order to create an FBX with the specific variant. I don’t think there would be a good way to do this if I just put the .blend file into the Assets folder.
Another common situation is when making modular pieces. In Blender, it’s useful to make sets of these in a single project file because you can test-fit them and reuse geometry from one to another, but they typically need to be separate meshes made into separate prefabs in Unity.
Like @halley1 , I also version-control my Blender files, but not within the Unity project.
