I have some level of comfort exporting from Blender and importing into Unity using FBX finally. I say some level of comfort because it works like a champ using material without nodes. Exporting/Importing with node materials is still a little sketchy. The first little surprise was the materials came over without any adjustment in Unity, meaning when I moved from Blender into Unity the textures were already applied to the materials. Every thing I have watched or read indicated I must drag and drop my textures onto the materials after import and I did not have to do that, it was automatic. The biggest surprise was when I created the animations in Blender. I was under the assumption when I created the animations in Blender the animation would transfer over as a single animation.What I am trying to say is, if I created an animation of two different drawers opening on my dresser, I would get a single animation with both drawers opening when the file was brought into Unity. To my surprise what transferred over was two individual animation files, one for each drawer, a hallelujah moment. Next on the list is apply the animations to the game objects and watch them move in Unity, first in the legacy animation system and then Mecanim, getting the node materials to transfer correctly can wait as I have my first asset created, imported into Unity with animations so it is time to get those to work first.

After I get both types of materials to export correctly and animations working in both animation systems I’ll put something together in print and possibly video showing everything I needed to do. I hope this would help others that have had specific questions along these lines and found it as difficult as I have to get that information in one place.

I made my first attempt at transferring a model from Blender into Unity and ran into one hiccup, the materials did not transfer over. The model looks good but when I select either the drawer or dresser in Unity the inspector shows the same material, ‘No Name’ shader. The problem here is both items have the same material which means when I place the texture into the shader the both get the same texture and they are two different textures. I made an error in the naming of the textures in Blender or did not select a check box or…. I’ll figure it out and update. I’m sure it is something simple.

Edit:

Here is the results of the first import after reverting to regular non-cycles materials. I created and then baked the materials/textures in cycles but had some problems exporting. It was exporting textures that were not attached to any materials. I tried removing all fake users etc., saving and loading again yet, one texture image remained. Now I know why people always ask for a way to view and or delete orphaned textures. So, this is the first iteration, no animations though, baby steps 🙂

My first game asset is complete for testing purposes. Tonight and during the weekend I will be create animations foe each of the drawers with sound of them opening and closing. After this I will be importing everything into Unity and creating scripts to open and closed the drawers. I’m sure this will be just the first of hundreds of test and retests I will be doing during the creation of this game.

Yesterday, I found a book I think I have been looking for. It is called: ‘Practical Game Development with Unity and Blender’, the perfect companion book for what I am trying to do. This book was just released in June 2014 (this year) using Blender 2.68a while I am using 2.71 and while I am not sure of the version of Unity he is using, given the time frame of release I’m betting he is using 4.3 while I have 4.5 (I skipped 4.4 or it was console only, not free).  With that said this book looks to be the ticket as it will not be running through all the basics of Unity or Blender interface, which I am very familiar with and, crossing fingers here, getting into some of the things I have been looking for information on. I would much rather find all the information I need myself through searching online, videos or reading books. The last think I want to do is ask on the forums. I am not against asking there, I don’t want my questions to end up being very easy to answer if I had only looked. If I get completely stuck, yes I will ask but only as a last resort.

Here is my finished product: Dresser

I started baking my game assets using cycles today and I think it turned out pretty good take a look at the results below. What I’m not sure about is when I add the faces of the drawers and the drawer handles will I be parenting these to the existing drawers or adding them to the drawer model and then creating a texture sheet with all of the textures included.