I have been reading and watching tutorials on Lynda and I can’t wait to get started making something substantial. However from all my reading and hours of watching instructors teach Unity I have “basic” questions that are unanswered. It leads me to believe the answer is “Whatever works best for me”. I will ask anyway and hopefully someone will be able to help.
My question is: Should I try to do everything in Unity as much as possible? What I mean is should I texture, rig, animate assets in Unity or should I try to do as much as possible in a 3D modeling program and then import that into Unity? Unity does a lot of what a 3D modeling program can do, and I have seen crappy YouTube videos in the past where the person applies textures to something in Blender3D for example and it basically breaks when they import it into Unity.
Is there a common rule of thumb so to speak when establishing a workflow or pipeline? I almost feel like I would just do the bare bones modeling of empty shells in a 3D modeling program and do the rest inside of Unity. Does anyone know if I am asking for a world of pain by thinking like that? I was thinking model in Blender do everything else in Unity.
Is there a post or article that explains this process? I did a search for this here and gave up after I was 8 pages deep so if I missed something obvious I apologize.
You cannot texture or rig assets in Unity, and the animation creator is lackluster. Unity is the program where you snap all your animations, textures, models, sounds, and scripts together (Mecanim’s Animation Trees are a prime example). As a general rule, do as much outside Unity as you can- just make sure you frequently test your assets inside the engine.
For models I usually model everything in Blender, and bake normal and other maps as necessary. Then I take the maps into GIMP (free equivalent of photoshop), edit them as necessary, and make my diffuse texture (basically the texture’s colour). Then I just save the blender and image files inside of Unity and put them together.
Take a look at this tutorial; it runs through modelling, baking normal maps, texturing, and importing into Unity quite nicely:
For environment stuff I’d say model as much as you can within Unity, using something like ProBuilder, or the terrain tools, or whatever fits your needs.
But yeah, for your “actors”, you generally do those in your modelling tool and import them.
Thanks guys, that is a big help. One of the biggest things that drew me to Unity in the first place was the rate at which you can get a prototype up and running by snapping it all together so to speak. It is a big help. I will be doing as much as possible in Blender and putting it together in Unity like mentioned. Thanks again.