I’m having a frustrating time trying to get some 3D models into Unity. I’m used to modelling programs designed for engineers. Autodesk Inventor is a good example, I can create a sketch, dimension everything to taste, extrude, chamfer, bevel and rotate to my heart’s content. Everything is nice and consistent. The game I am working has a nice, consistent style and spacing to its world, I’m trying to model it accordingly.
Unfortunately Inventor cannot export directly to .obj file types, meaning I need another program running, like blender or 3ds max, as well as Unity itself, in order to run file conversions. It’s a pain and the time it takes from altering a model to seeing it update in Unity is just plain frustrating. Blender, 3ds max, as well as Unity’s new ProBuilder tools, all build and edit surface models. I find their control schemes frustrating and I find the way a model is edited, not as a solid, but as a collection of surfaces, downright impossible. Modeling solids is fantastic, it’s consistent and efficient, because adjacent, parallel faces are often automatically consolidated into a single surface. Excess edges and vertices are automatically removed, you can just keep growing your model without all these extra geometric features messing up your creation. What’s a good tool I can use straight with Unity that will let me work like this?
(ProBuilder is driving me mental. I REALLY want to love it, but I can’t predict where extra or invisible edges will appear, messing with surfaces more than I could believe. It’s very unpredictable and inconsistent, at least from my perspective, I can’t detect any pattern as to when geometry will be screwed up beyond the point of saving or when it will just “work”.)
It’d be good learning for me, too, since we are getting more and more autocad/engineer/etc users picking up the tools