Preparing your models for Unity

So there are some last steps necessary. I know you all have been working hard, but in order for me to convert your models into Unity within one week, I need some help. Below, you'll find all necessary steps to take to prepare your models for me, so I can import them into Unity.

Get rid of Primitives, Generators, and Splines

So the first step for you, when you are finished with your project, is to save it under another name. In case something goes wrong, you can always come back to the original. The model should only exist as a pure Mesh model, which means you have to get rid of all the Primitives, Booles, Cloner, Deformer, Splines, and whatnot you have used. This step is rather easy, as you simply have to C all the objects. Nevertheless, I urge you to go through your Object Manager step by step and do it sequentially. Make sure everything converts the way you want.

All textures need to be alone and UVW

All right, this is more complicated. In order for Unity to understand your textures, you need to bake them. Yes, you heard right, we will bake today. First we need to identify all the objects, that need our attention.

Object Groups

First of all: We need to combine objects that share textures, so we can bake them properly. This is sometimes difficult, but manageable. 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.

In order to do so, you select all the objects (that by now should all be meshes) that you want to combine in the Objects-Manager. Do a right-click on them and select Connect Objects + Delete. This will combine them into one object! Nice, huh? 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 baking... We only need to bake textures on objects where a) the object has still multiple executes or b) the texture(s) are not in UVW mode. You can check the mode by clicking on the texture tag and look into 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 then hit SHIFT+C to open up the Command Line. Enter Bake and select Bake object.... Make sure you only select Single Texture, Supersampling = 0, Pixel Border = 1, Width & Height something between 512 and 8.192 (make sure to create square textures, therefore enter always the same size in width and height). You also have to select a place where to store the baked texture by clicking the three dots besides Path Name. It makes sense to store the new texture in the "tex" folder of your project. Hit Bake and see what happens.

If all went well you should see the baked object with only one texture in UVW projection. The command has left the original object there, just in case, but invisible. If you are 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!