Unity cloud build and Blender

Unity Services
1

Howdy Y’all!

Does Unity Cloud Build support .blend files by any chance?

Best,
David Brooks

2

Hey David,

Unfortunately, Cloud Build does not handle native .blend files. To use these models with a Cloud Build workflow you will need to export them to non-proprietary format like .fbx.

Hope this helps!

3

Thanks for the info! Is there a timeline for when .blend support will be added to Unity Cloud Build? The Unity editor and compiler on my local machine can handle the .blend files. Is it a big LOE to add that functionality to the Cloud Build tool, especially since it already exists in the Unity editor and compiler?

Best,
David Brooks

1 Like
4

AFAIK, .blend file is a memory dump kind of file from blender. Blender only can load it back to memory. So the maximum integration point would involve opening a blender instance in cloud and load the file in that blender instance; then use some custom addons to export to standard file formats like obj or fbx to use it in Unity.

1 Like
5

Interesting… I use my .blend files in Unity and they work in the editor and they get compiled in when I build locally. Is Unity just opening Blender in the background or something to make that work?

6

They might be.
\Editor\Data\Tools\Unity-BlenderToFBX.py actually contains blender scripting apis in it.

import bpy.ops
    bpy.ops.export_scene.fbx(filepath=outfile, ...
7

Any way to automate this ? Maybe thanks to \Editor\Data\Tools\Unity-BlenderToFBX.py ?

2 Likes
8

I’m using another method now, from GitHub - jonathanleang/blendToFbxExporterForUnity that I execute in my CI pipeline before unity.
I’m still having some visual issues with the shaders/lightning but the models and textures are here and working.
I guess I’d probably need to reimport prefab that includes the blend files in the build process or something like that

9

Has there been any evolution in this?
I am facing the same problem.