I was not quite sure of the language I needed to describe this, so to Answers I went!
I am using the 2D Shooter project as a base (2d space invaders style) and wanted to import a 3DS Max ship model I found. It imports fine, and I replace the cubes mesh with it.
The problem I am having is that I need to rotate it so it faces 'up'. When I do that, my movement controls (Right and Left rotate it) no longer work as they did with the cube. Instead the ship will just roll and so on.
I'm guessing the uniformity of the cube fed into some assumptions I made. So what is the proper way to rotate this model?
The "forward" direction of your model is determined by the z-axis orientation in your 3D modelling program. When you import the model, the y-axis should be up. The Unity resources explain some possible fixes here.
In my case I’m using Blender, and this problem occured while the mesh didn’t have armature (I forgot to add it), but once I created a bone and parented it to the mesh, the rotation in Unity was fixed.
It happens to me quite a lot with 3DS MAX and the way I fix it is by rotating the PIVOT POINT by -90 on the X axis, so the pivot end up with Y facing down, you won’t see this change in the model window but when you import it will notice the difference.