How to make simple geometric meshes that accept textures?

Questions & Answers
1

I’m still at the tinkering stage, learning the basics of Unity, and would like to be able to render a few simple geometric meshes for the my experiments, and apply textures to them.

At first I thought this would be simple. I grabbed a copy of Blender, followed enough tutorials to make a shape I wanted, exported it as a 3ds file, imported that into my Unity project, and then spent hours going around in circles trying to figure out why nothing I would do could get the shape to accept a recognizable texture.

What help I’ve found on the subject leads into a forest of jargon past anything I’d expected to navigate.

Given that I considered learning how to make simple geometric shapes in Blender “easy”, is there an easy combination of steps that (employing any inexpensive rendering program currently available for Windows 7 that you might wish to name) will allow me to get such geometric shapes into Unity in a state that I can then apply textures to?

2

fffMalzber is correct about uv’s. Just to be clear, the problem is 100% that you made a shape that can’t have a texture. And 0% that Unity imported it wrong or doesn’t know how to apply textures. Not trying to be harsh – I’m saying don’t waste any time trying to fix some interaction between Blender and Unity, because that’s not the problem.

UV-mapping is totally the 3D modeller’s job. It’s not a Unity thing. It’s the standard way all 3D models tell texures how to be applied. Unity’s UV settings are just a copy of the standard way.

UV-mapping is a little confusing, but easy enough once you learn it. All the info will be in places like “blender make UV map” or just “what is UV mapping.”

And, FBX or OBJ is a more standard format. 3ds is the 3DS-Max format, and is only for when you need to go from blender to Max. Think it’s a little larger (but not sure.)

3

You do not need to export a blend file to an other format. Unity 5 supports it