Question regarding Maya

Unity Engine
1

Hi guys,

I’m very new to Unity and have a question. I’ve been looking for an answer, but my question is either too obscure or too simple to have shown up yet. (I suspect the latter…)

I’m building a level based on a square block of Paris and am trying to plan the workflow.

I’m hoping to model the entire scene (buildings, grass, etc) in Maya 2011 and then import the entire scene into Unity to be used as the level.

Is this possible and/or advised?

Also, do you recommend that I import some objects individually? Examples - phone booths, park benches, parked cars, lamp posts, plants.

I apologize if I’ve missed these topics elsewhere in the forums.

Thanks!

2

You can do it both ways:

  1. Build all level in Maya (or any other 3d modeling tool). It’s worth mentioning that Unity doesn’t support import of instances - they will be imported as clones.
  2. Build building blocks in Maya and then build level from them in Unity. This allows you to create prefabs for each block and add all additional info, so this works much better from instancing point of view.
3

Is there no way to import instance information from 3D packages, rather than having to re-layout stuff in Unity?

Definitely one for the wish list!

4

At least in Maya, all instances share the same shape node. So you could write a script in Python that checks to see if the mesh has already been saved as a model and reference the same model in Unity.

What I’ve been working on is a system where whenever the processor hits a reference, it grabs the reference’s name and saves that with position information to a text file. Then you can use that text file in Unity to populate a scene.

5

.fbx supports instances in the file format now (latest 2011 version). I would love it if the Unity engine could support this feature, I’m not sure how they would go about it mostly because of prefabs. It’s one of the few things that put me off of Unity other than the coordinate handedness problems when importing from a lot of 3d apps.

6

I was looking into instance support today. There are various problem in fbx - Referenced objects from 3dsMax are not exported as expected. Materials do not work that well too. The first thing to do will be to support basic mesh sharing between imported game objects. Then we can think about prefabs…

7

Brilliant news Paulius, glad it’s something being looked at :slight_smile: