Preparing your models for Unity

There are just a few more things to do. I know you've all been working hard, but I need some help to convert your models into Unity within a week. Please look at the list below for all the steps you need to take to prepare your models for me so I can import them into Unity.

Get rid of Primitives, Generators, and Splines

When you're done with your project, save it under a different name. That way, if something goes wrong, you can always go back to the original. The model should only be a Mesh model, so get rid of all the other elements like Primitives, Booles, Cloner, Deformer, Splines, etc. This step is easy: just select all the objects and press C. However, I suggest that you go through your Object Manager step by step, in order. This will make sure that everything is converted how you want it to be.

All textures need to be alone and UVW

OK, this is more complicated. To use Unity with your textures, you need to bake them. Yes, you heard right – we're going to bake today. First, we need to find all the objects that need our attention.

Object Groups

First of all, we need to combine objects that have the same textures so that we can bake them properly. This can sometimes be difficult, but it is possible. Imagine this: we need single objects with only one texture. If you have hierarchies with several objects, but using one texture that is assigned to the parent, we need to fuse all these objects (including the parent) into one.

To do this, select all the objects (which should all be meshes by now) in the Objects-Manager. Right-click on them and select Connect Objects + Delete. This will combine them into one object! It's that easy. Be smart about it though, and think about what makes sense to fuse and what not.

If the resulting objects still have multiple textures, don't worry – we will solve this in the next step.

Bake textures

So, about baking... We only need to bake textures on objects where:

• the object has multiple executes; or
• the texture(s) are not in UVW mode. You can check the mode by clicking on the texture tag and looking in the Attributes Manager. Under Projection, there should be UVW. If not, don't change it, because it will probably look weird. We will bake the object instead.

To bake an object, select the object in the Objects Manager and press SHIFT+C to open the Command Line. Then enter Bake and select Bake object... Make sure you only select Single Texture. Then, set the supersampling to 0, the pixel border to 1, and set the width and height to somewhere between 512 and 8.192. Remember to create square textures, so always enter the same size for width and height. Finally, click the three dots next to Path Name to choose a place to store the baked texture. It's a good idea to store the new texture in the tex folder of your project. Then hit Bake and see what happens.

If you've done everything right, you should now only see one texture in UVW projection. The command has left the original object there, just in case, but you can't see it. If you're happy with the result, you can delete the original object, so only the baked object remains.

Do this for all the objects in the scene so that in the end you have:

1. Only meshes
2. All meshes that need a texture have a single texture in UVW projection
3. Everything is named properly, without any special characters (ä, ö, ü, ß. &, etc..)

Done!