Course for modeling and exporting GAME ASSETS from Blender into UNITY, etc

[fazel829]

I completed Mr. Abbitt’s Blender Environmental Artist course - and while it is excellent - a cabin that I’ve created based on the tutorial I tried importing into UNITY and I’ve learned that it’s not such a straight forward process…specifically the materials/textures being properly exported.

From my readings, Unity does not translate any of Blender’s customer shaders in the shader graph; when I exported my model into Unity, the textures were incorrectly assigned to the materials and the COLOR RAMPs I used in Blender were completely ignored. This is after trying both export methods (copying the .blend file into Unity’s ASSET folder or exporting an .fbx file and copying the ‘textures’ folder from blender and creating a new ‘materials’ folder in the same directory.

Is there a course specific to creating models and exporting them into game engines like UNITY? I’m guessing the shaders need to be as simple as possible and I’m assuming the colors have to be manually selected from the ‘properties’ window in UNITY.

Please help!

[Todd_Vance]

The short answer is, mostly the materials need to be fixed by hand. The procedural materials have to be baked to textures (either that or recreated as shaders in Unity, which is harder) for Unity to use them in the standard shaders included with it. The Blender Character Creator V2.0 has some lectures on baking and exporting to Unity.

The longer answer is:

One thing that helps (and helps for games) is to have “atlas textures and materials” so many assets baked onto the same 4096x4096 textures on a common material. Then there is less fix-up by hand. That is illustrated at the end of Blender Character Creator V2.0 (worth learning to do anyway! Even a poor artist like myself got some decent results from that course.) for exporting a multi-object character to Unity, where Grant goes through the process to bake multiple objects to the same textures. (I recall some baking lectures and texture atlas lectures in the Environment course too, but no Unity lectures)

Blender can put many of the textures into the FBX if they are connected as directly as possible to the principled shader (no mix nodes, color ramps, etc.) if you export to fbx using “Copy Paths” and click to highlight (in blue) the icon to the right of it to pack textures into FBX:

But even then Unity is not very good at pulling them out and putting them where they belong. In particular, Unity prefers a “Smoothness” texture where Blender outputs a “Roughness” texture, and Unity wants the smoothness to be the alpha channel of the Metallic map (unless you write your own shader, which I sometimes do with ShaderGraph in URP). I personally use image processing software (GIMP, Image Magick (the last is advanced!)) to do that. Normal and Color can be put into the standard shader by hand and “sometimes” Unity figures it out correctly. Blender doesn’t use Ambient Occlusion textures and doesn’t know to export that into FBX.

So, without installing some (paid! I searched for it) add on or writing code (python for Blender and c# for Unity) it will always be a lot of manual work.

[fazel829]

Thanks for responding. I’m still in the infancy of learning about shaders and i understand Unity won’t understand anything outside of very basic shaders and I’m surely not at the point to write my own!

What paid add on is there? Is it for Blender or Unity?

[NP5]

It seems it is not that straight forward moving things to game engines. Well depending on the game engine I believe Godot is better? Games are not an area I ever use.

It does get asked now and again for a course on the ‘gap’ between Blender and various engines but I suspect it is not done by anyone much for a reason. I suggest going top the GameDev Discord where other users of Unity may well be able to help of point you at some YouTube help.

[Todd_Vance]

Can’t really remember, just that nothing I saw on Blendermarket or on Unity Asset Store had a description that made me certain enough of its utility that I would buy it.