When setting up units “correctly” I must change a lot of default settings – can someone explain?

Questions & Answers
1

I’m working in Maya, units set to cm, and am bringing in assets at import scale of 1.0. This seems correct – I am using the “Stealth Tutorial” level as a guide – I make a 180cm tall block in Maya and bring it into Unity and it is about the same height as the character in the tutorial level.

However:

  1. Shadows at this scale get clipped almost immediately unless I increase the shadow clip plane by a factor of 100

  2. Shadows look crappy unless I increase the bias significantly

  3. If I drop a Unity primitive into the scene (cube, capsule) it is incredibly tiny – if I scale it to 100 it seems like the “intended” size

  4. The third person controller prefab that comes with the editor comes in natively at the small scale, exactly 1% the size of the character from the “Stealth Tutorial”.

  5. A gameplay mechanic that I am employing that depends on physics doesn’t work properly at the default (small) scale

If this is a legitimate scale to work at, why do I have to change so many defaults? Why has Unity (the company) provided two character examples at sizes that differ by a factor of 100? I want to move forward, but would love to hear some opinions about if this is really correct, why so many adjustments need to be made to the default settings.

Thanks!

-Andy 

2

The legitimate scale is that of the std Unity cubes and the Unity character controllers. A std Unity cube is 1 meter in diameter and the physics engine will treat it as such. If you go with something 100 times bigger than this then the physics engine will deal with it as though it is a giant, is that what you want?

Are you sure the character from the stealth tutorial that is 100 times bigger is not a model that is 100 times bigger that is then reduced in scale via it’s import settings to a normal size?