Blender Materials to Unity Workflow

Hi everyone,

I am a programmer with beginner/intermediate knowledge about Blender. I user Blender since many years as a hobby for myself, but I never used it for creating models for other tools like Unity.

For a tutorial I tried to create a longbow mesh by myself to learn more about the process of getting stuff into Unity. I did not had much problems creating the mesh and materials in Blender, but when the moment came to test the model inside Unity I was stuck.

The Problem is not exporting the mesh from blender, but the materials. The bow is one single mesh, consisting of 4 different materials and each material is created by a node setup with up to 4 different texture maps (color, normal, occ, spec, roughness). The string material is procedural and here os an example of one of the materials:



I got it done to bake all 4 material color textures into one, but i fell short with every other texture (especially the normal map). I wanted to combine normal map of all 4 materials into 1 normal map for the whole mesh. But I could not find a way to do that.

I assume my whole workflow of Blender to Unity is flawed and most other people doing it in another way. I realy appreciate it if someone could point me to some documentation or an tutorial, which goes deeper into the topic of transfering materials from Blender to Unity, or tells me how this problem is normally solved?

Sorry if this question is very similiar to other questions in this forum. I tried to find an answer to my problem but could not find a thread which realy answered my question. So please have mercy on my poor soul . I also watched some Youtube tutorials of exporting Blender models to Unity, but none of them touched the problem of exporting/combining pre exsisting texture and normal maps into one texture/normal map.

Cheers
a Unity Noob

ps: I attached the last stage of the bow mesh without textures, if this is of any help.

 

Those two applications have their own, totally unique rendering methods. Blender is ray-tracing. For the most part ray-tracing isn't practical in real time applications, and most game engines do not do that.

The "materials" are just a container of properties or arguments for lighting functions in a rendering system. Blender's materials have no immediate relationship to BRDF lighting techniques, and so only a few basic properties are borrowed such as albedo/diffuse color and specularity; but even so they will not appear the same in Unity not because anything is wrong with Unity or Blender but because they are fundamentally different beasts with different goals.

You make materials for game engines in tools made for game engines, and if you make really unique materials it's because you're making shaders, because that's what's behind the material.

 

That said the terminology you have been exposed to will still be useful in Unity, since the exposed properties and overall concepts - outside of lighting - are in deed very similar.

 

Thank you very much for your help!

Ok, I understand now that I can't use materials from Blender in Unity. Are there any other tools, assisting material creation with Unity?

I know I can UV unwrap my model and stitch my Textures together in Photoshop/Gimp, but is there a better alternative? Because using this method has a long feedback loop. Every change in the model/texture/normal needs to be saved and imported into Unity to see the result.

Is there an established workflow/toolchain of creating models/assets for Unity? Like this:

1. Creating the model with Blender, Maya, etc.
2. Creating/combining the textures with ???
3. Importing model + textures in Unity
4. Fine tuning texture settings in Unity

 

For creating materials like blender you can use Substance Designer and Substance Painter that is the workflow and you can substitute these both in your - ??? in the 2nd point of the workflow/toolchain of creating models/assets for Unity!