What scale units should I use in 3DS/C4d/Maya etc when making objects for Unity

Unity Engine
1

Hi there,

I am really struggling with the scale issue- I’m a noobie.

I thought after watching some videos on lynda.com where they said ‘Unity uses meters’ that the sensible thing to do would be to set my system scale in 3DsMax to meters and my scene scale to meters too.

So I set about making relatively large objects in that scale, so things like a 4 meter wide object would be 4 in 3DS and end up being 4 unity units in Unity and have a scale of 1:1

Great, or so I thought until I tried to use lighting or GUI elements.

These things obviously expect objects to be a factor of hundreds of times bigger. For example if I try to apply a GUI Canvas object it is literally 600 times bigger than my scene, I have to zoom out, zoom out, zoom out for ever.

Then if I enlarge my scene so that it fits the scale of the GUI anything shiny just ends up white as the specular highlights just seem to overtake everything.

So what I want to know is, what settings should I use in Unity (where are they?) and what settings should I use in external programs so that everything is roughly in sync with what Unity GUI elements, lighting elements, particles etc etc are expecting.

i.e. if I make a 4m x 4m box in 3DS what should my settings be in 3DS so that when I export I dont get a stupidly small or stupidly large box? If I wanted the box to have a particle fire next to it maybe or a default sized button on one of its faces, how big should it be, what scale should I have used in the creation sftware (3DS etc) to make it roughly the right size?

Clearly Unity does not want a 4m x 4m box to be 4 Unity units x 4 Unity Units since everything goes mental- you cannot get close to it, its highlights just ends up white etc etc

So what is the right way to set things up?

2

My experience -
Set Max unity to meters. Export into Unity5 and a 1x1x1 meter box will match a default Unity cube perfectly.
I seem to remember the Unity default import settings in Unity4x was 0.1 but it showed as 1.0, so scaling everything up on import to 10 worked fine - without problem.
By chance are you still using Unity4?

3

@theANMATOR2b Thanks very much for the reply!

I think perhaps things are not a screwy as I first thought… I am doing stuff with Vuforia and that seems to be complicating things further. What was puzzling me was that my GUI canvas was about 600 times bigger than my 6m square scene and didn’t show up at run time. However once I removed the GUI from being a child of the Image Target then it did show at run time, so now its just enormous in the editor. If I scale the ImageTarget and the child scene up so that they are about the same size as the GUI, thats when all the surfaces of my models goes white and just look like the Specular highlights are overriding everything… Any idea why that is?

4

The default UI canvas is generally much larger than a realistically scaled scene in the Editor. This is normal and not an issue (except the canvas can get in the way of raycasts sometimes). I wouldn’t scale my scene up to better “match” the canvas.

1 Like
5

Pro tip- Press the “f” key when the UI canvas is selected to zoom to it’s size- no need to try to zoom to it manually.